Category: Book Features

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but youÕre blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you canÕt see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

RiosÕ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of JoyceÕs — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from EmilÕs friend MonsÕ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the charactersÕ lives and loves, weÕre intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narratorÕs ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: ÒThat delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.Ó

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. TheyÕll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaningÕs there, but youÕve got to know what to look for to get it.

DonÕt get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But donÕt eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for GodÕs sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.

As it is in Larry Brown’s fiction, so be it in Larry Brown’s nonfiction: straight up. Language: straightforward; method: straight-shooting. He’s made that way his way in short stories and novels, in one work of nonfiction (On Fire), and again in nonfiction, now, in Billy Ray’s Farm (Algonquin), a new selection of previously published magazine articles, plus a closing essay titled super-economically “Shack.”

That “shack,” like the author’s writing, is simply put: a set of walls and roof Brown built with his own hands on his own land in Tula, Mississippi, where, if he wishes, he can watch the rain come down, maybe step outside and fish, maybe strum a guitar. Maybe write? Sometime, perhaps, when the tiny building is finally finished and when, as he describes elsewhere in these pages, he is: not on a book tour, not at the Enid Spillway “fish grab,” not at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, not aiming at coyotes, not rescuing goats, not wrestling with a “calfpuller” and mother heifer and unborn calf, and not remembering the kindnesses shown to him by personal hero Harry Crews and an unsung hero praised nonetheless by Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones.

Brown met Jones in 1989. The occasion: Brown’s first literary conference. And it’s an occasion in Billy Ray’s Farm for Brown to state explicitly what Jones succeeded in doing and what Brown, implicitly, hopes himself to achieve in fiction: “a relentless forward drive of narrative”; “the ordinary things of life [witnessed] with great clarity, [the] weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters”; “people … caught up in the events around them and swept forward … to the point where drastic actions can result.” In short, fiction populated by “people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed.” Better put, shorter still: to make something that “makes you forget that you’re reading.”

Needing, however, more than a cow’s prolapsed uterus in the way of “drastic action”? Conflict both internal and external, on a grand scale? People caught up in events and swept forward, even unto certain death? Something nowhere near the “ordinary” but “things,” the weather, the seasons, the land around people so caught, witnessed with great clarity? Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (in paperback from Penguin) may be a story the author found fully formed when he first set foot in Sarajevo in 1993, but you’ll in no way forget you’re reading. You may in fact feel the urge to stop reading and throw up once inside this eyewitness reporter’s heroin-fed brain and inside his depiction of contemporary warfare, Balkans-style and centuries in the making.

That this author is still alive isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of miracle. When he isn’t shooting up on return trips to London, he’s shooting (as cameraman) any number of atrocities and being shot at (as sitting duck) by any number of sides responsible for those atrocities in war-torn Bosnia.

Loyd’s employer was The Times of London, but Loyd’s outlook isn’t a seasoned newspaperman’s cool detachment. He knowingly, repeatedly, recklessly, suicidally (?) plants himself where the going gets tough and the tough (including innocents) get … what? In the way. Of bullets and bayonets and worse. Those bullets and bayonets, backed by bloodthirsty commanders backed by competing, insane nationalisms, this book does something to explain but in no way explains away. Better, as in the case of a kitten making off with a man’s spilled brains or as in the sight of a disoriented crone wielding a man’s severed leg, you, like Loyd, cast your feelings in the bin marked “horrible” and wait “until the night’s darkness paroles them into your dreams.” That a self-professed fuck-up as major as Anthony Loyd could pull himself together and graduate to writing this good must say something about A) the educational might of England or B) the survivor instinct inbred in Loyd from a host of military forefathers. The result either way: a dispatch from the nightmare also known as front-page news.

An altogether different, private, bloodless nightmare presents itself the second you so much as read a word of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (Knopf), the private portion being the realization, despite education and reading, you don’t know squat. The least but immediate of the book’s virtues? It’s short. Meaning: a complete reread isn’t an option, it’s a given. The topic: nothing less than the foundation of Literature itself, with a capital L; man’s perception of the gods as real entities, interceding, wrecking, inspiring earthly affairs and stretching back to archaic Greece and antique Rome; the much earlier source of that interplay, the early Vedic verses and ritual practices of India; and the revolutionary reworking of individual consciousness that took place in 19th-century Germany and France, according to avant-garde theories of artistic creation, the very well-spring of modernism. Course requirements: a working knowledge (preferably in the original but translations, for wimps, provided) of Baudelaire, Heine, Hölderlin, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and never will you feel stupider than you will reading this book. Dig out from college your thinking cap and forget about forgetting you’re reading.

Kathleen Norris, author of three books of poetry and three books of autobiography (Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace), spent four years of college out-of-it and five years at the Academy of American Poets in the thick of it. Both scenes she describes in all honesty, no rancor, splendidly in The Virgin of Bennington — Bennington being the college in Vermont she attended; virgin being Norris’ self-described state upon entering it and, in ways more than one, upon leaving it.

Technically, though, a virgin she was not, having struck up a sexual relationship (discounting an earlier crush on a fellow female student) with that most dependable of love objects, given the time (the mid-’60s) and the place (a small, very expensive, very East Coast, very arty liberal arts college): a professor. The man goes nameless, not blameless, but Norris wastes no pages getting back at him and instead gets on with it, it being the story of a supersensitive girl whose bright idea of a good time, age 16, was watching Through a Glass Darkly accompanied by a dog-eared copy of The Sickness unto Death.

The politicized, sexualized, “aggressively au courant milieu” of Bennington taught her one thing, however: how not to read a poem, how not to make it a mere “puzzle,” a subject for “pitiless dissection,” a “problem to be solved using intellectual means.” She went the opposite extreme — to steeping herself in the Romantics, “which meant becoming immersed in heady notions of the poet as mystic, seer, lover, hierophant, drunk, and all-around screw-up, an identity just foolhardy enough to attract [her] at the time.” Exit college. Enter Elizabeth Kray.

Kray did not establish New York’s Academy of American Poets, but she did greatly expand its financial base, its visibility, and its mission to fund and defend poets and poetry’s practical place in people’s lives. She set up prizes. She set up high-school programs. She set up reading tours. She set up translations of foreign poets’ work. And she set up Kathleen Norris, who calls Kray her “mentor,” a “force,” the best reader she ever had, and one of two women (the other being the academy’s founder, Marie Bullock) who “indelibly changed the landscape for poetry in America.” From 1969 to 1974 Norris also called her boss.

The job was tailor-made, one that required Norris to attend poetry readings several times a week (“my idea of heaven on earth”), attend to the poets themselves (screw-ups included), and attend to office chores (“behind a mask of efficiency”). But this “ideal” life was itself “a kind of fiction,” a “retreat from the pressures of having to create a life,” a perfect place for one who “often acted,” Norris writes, “as if I had made a pact not to be present in my own life.” The mere purchase of salt and pepper shakers in big, bad New York could fill Norris “with trepidation.” Imagine then the will it took for her to answer the office phone. (When finally forced to, it was “Mr. Auden” on the other end, on a pay phone, down to his last coins, stuck on Long Island. Norris succeeded in very efficiently cutting him off.)

The will to establish a personal life during these years took its own turns, though, quite outside anyone’s definition of virginity and, in the case of this book, quite good if your goal is good copy: brief affairs, longer friendships with Gerard Malanga (poet and photographer, “prince and punk”) and Jim Carroll (heroin addict but sweet); nightspots ranging from that “state-of-the-art den of iniquity” Max’s Kansas City to what must count, in its day, as ground zero: the women’s bathroom at Sanctuary (where a transvestite offered the author makeup tips, valuable consolation, and one life-altering lesson); buddiedom with Ultra Violet (from whom Norris nearly rented a room) and Andrea Dworkin (with whom Norris shared dorm space); plus guest appearances by Patti Smith, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and yes, some dozens of poets, on and off the reading circuit that Kray masterminded and Norris got very good at publicizing.

Kathleen Norris has done her bit. Now you do yours. Click on www.poets.org to nominate your favorite poet for future stamps from the U.S. Postal Service. The site belongs to the Academy of American Poets, which is alive and well thanks in every part to Elizabeth Kray, lastingly brought to you courtesy of The Virgin of Bennington. — Leonard Gill

The Penultimate Suitor, By Mary Leader, University of Iowa Press, 76 pp., $13 (paper)

Mary Leader’s second volume of poetry, The Penultimate Suitor, winner of the 2000 Iowa Poetry Prize, is a work of stunning ambition and confidence that attempts an array of lyrical forms and manages to rally them toward her singular cause: the explication of the idea that love and art serve as impetus for one another.

Leader, who teaches at the University of Memphis, has a knack for imbuing her poems with a taut emotional focus. It is this focus that allows her to show equal fascination with words and the visual dalliance of those words with the page.

In several poems, Leader becomes an avatar of the obsessive structuring of poets like Dylan Thomas. “Heavy Roses” relies heavily on the @ symbol to represent rosebuds seen from above. One section of this poem is written in the shape of the stain a clipped rose might leave if pressed in a book. The concern with the meaning of the visual as it relates to the art-fraught meaning of what is said proves interesting enough here, but I find the poetic whimsy perhaps a little much.

It seems the use of more visually appealing elements has mitigated the power of some of these poems, in that they are somewhat vain as to their appearance and not necessarily vain as to the importance of what they intend to express. This is most bothersome in one poem, “Depiction of a Game as if by Pieter Brueghel the Elder,” which is lovely in its wordplay but not in its ambiguity. Of three sections in this poem, one seems to have actually been verse at one point, but Leader has changed the font to what I can only describe as dingbats, an alphabet of symbols that say little, especially if the piece is to summon Brueghel for the reader.

All this aside, I must allow that Leader is just having some fun with us. My ultimate concern with a book of poetry is that the sum be greater than its parts. I want to be rewarded for giving my full attention to what the poet has to show me. And Leader does reward the keen observer of her lines. It must be said that much of today’s poetry is bereft of that simple songlike quality that made poetry poetry ages ago, but Leader hews close to tradition while exploring the other ways the medium affords a poet to express herself and experiment with form.

— Jeremy Spencer

Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, is a novel in three parts, the first of which is fine enough, the second of which is very fine, and the third of which is I don’t know what.

We’ll start, as Tan does, with the “fine enough” part, which has as lead character Ruth Young, a ghostwriter in her late 40s in contemporary San Francisco who deciphers the scribblings of self-help, New Age, and cyberspace-loving authors who haven’t the time or talent to put word to thought themselves. Young lives with Art (a university linguist) and Art’s two teenage daughters (full-time whiners), and things are tense. Because? Young is getting on Art’s nerves. Young is too “accommodating” when it comes to hand-holding her spaced-out clients. Young too easily makes easy matters difficult. Young elects to slide into mutism every August 12th. And Young’s mother, LuLing (in the early stages of Alzheimer’s?), is getting on Young’s nerves too. These scenes add up to what has become in too much fiction these days a dependable and upper-middle-class “to do” list that may be convincingly rendered but not especially of interest to you or anyone.

Skip to the “I don’t know what” and third part of The Bonesetter’s Daughter: LuLing gets a boyfriend. (Impossibly.) Young gets back on track with Art. (Quickly. Unconvincingly.) Young starts writing her own, instead of others’, stuff. (Predictably.) And LuLing and Young get back in touch and back to basics, way back, then out of one another’s hair. (Inconceivably.)

Which leaves us the middle and “very fine” section of Tan’s book: LuLing’s girlhood in China in the Thirties, and what went down in a small village called Immortal Heart, at the edge of a cliff overlooking a ravine called the End of the World, inside the household of an extended family of quality inkmakers, and before LuLing’s birth, inside the thought of LuLing’s biological mother and inside the events she put up with as tradition dictated. Then back to LuLing and what she went through during the war and after in her efforts to reach California.

This is complicated, verging on mystifying, but satisfying storytelling on Tan’s part, rich in custom and richer in telling, human detail, detail the author puts more to her disposal than the latter-day observations that litter and detract from her book’s parts one and three.

What modernist claimed his story lines had a clear beginning, middle, and end, but not in that order? The Bonesetter’s Daughter makes that order easy, and it’s this: go for the middle, double-back to the beginning, end up last.

Body and Soul

In 1987, the Church Health Center opened its doors with this goal in mind: to bring quality health care in Memphis to the working poor, their families, the elderly, the uninsured, the homeless. Fourteen years later, the center has grown to become a model of its kind– treating over 30,000 patients per year and staffed by over 400 physician volunteers, in addition to nurses, dentists, optometrists, and office workers. It receives no government funds; the current annual budget of $6.5 million is based on the contributions of over 200 congregations throughout the city.

Dr. G. Scott Morris, the United Methodist minister who founded the center, is now author of a book that tells the stories of 14 patients and through those stories, Morris’ own. The introduction to Relief For the Body, Renewal For the Soul (Paraclete Press) covers the author’s personal response to the biblical injunction to treat the sick and care for the poor, then moves briefly to his seminary and medical training, then to his experience in Zimbabwe with village health-care workers and a witch doctor, a man who taught him to look for the spiritual source of disease, not just the scientific. But by far the greater share of the book is given over to the individuals who sought help from Church Health, got it, and in turn helped underscore Morris’ understanding of his own ministry Ñ to treat body and soul by putting belief into action.

To body and soul add mind in the case of The Bonesetter’s Daughter Building the Therapeutic Sanctuary (1st Books Library) by Ron McDonald, pastoral counselor at the Church Health Center. The subtitle reads, “The Fundamentals of Psychotherapy: A Pastoral Counseling Perspective,” which gives you some idea of the author’s blueprint approach to setting up “a sanctuary of healing,” one that is centered on the relationship between therapist and patient and built on “the boundary between religion and psychology.” His starting point, however, is faith, and in what may come as a shock to some, that applies as much to the counselor as it can to the patient. The book is a basic how-to on therapeutic principles that are so basic–Lesson One: Humility– not a few strictly secular psychotherapists would do well to have themselves a look.

[Dr. G. Scott Morris will be signing copies of his book at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, April 5th, from 5 to 7 p.m.]

River City “American Drag”

Department of English, University of Memphis, 182 pp., $7.

The winter 2001 edition of River City , the University of Memphis’ fiction and poetry journal, is something of a mixed bag of literary delights. Presumably in an effort to gather a more cohesive array of contributions, the editors of the journal choose a specific topic for each edition. For this season’s offering, we have “American Drag.”

Most of the work does either 1) deal directly with one’s gender as projected by the clothing one wears or 2) skirt, no pun intended, the idea of clothing and its general implication in one’s life, whether it be functional or manic.

But this by no means limits the quality of the work. The thematic contributions range the spectrum of writing. There are a few startlingly good short stories, some boisterously comic and others searingly witty or poignantly surreal. Of the many poems stuffed into the journal, some are forgettable, but a good portion of the work is accomplished and utterly approachable; and a few pieces satisfyingly shove at the boundaries of the form.

Also featured are some selections of photography that for the most part address the topic of appearance and all that’s tangled up in it. From drag queens to the living Barbie herself, from Mr. Bette Davis to a little girl in an overwhelming cosmetics aisle, from a Thinker taking a dump to an urban shotgun-wedding Van Eych, many strike out from the page.

Outside the confines of the topic of clothing, this edition also features the first, second, and third place winners of the annual River City Writing Awards In Fiction. Out of a field of some 300 entries, 10 stories were chosen to be read by renowned author Richard Ford, who chose the three winners. These were the highlight of “American Drag” for me, but don’t start with them. Give the journal a chance to alter your perception a little first. You will notice yourself picking up on things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I also particularly enjoyed Thomas Russell’s prefacing editor’s note, a unifying statement for the journal’s theme of dress that lays out the many intriguing ideas the disparate authors jointly represent throughout this issue.

My only criticism of “American Drag” would be that it could have used a little more fine-tuning in the proofing department. I may be prattling on about nothing of great concern, but easily corrected typos distract readers.

Copies of this newest issue of River City are available at Davis-Kidd Booksellers and a few other bookstores in the Memphis area, as well as the English department of the University of Memphis at 678 4591.

Information regarding the River City writing contests can be found on the Web at www.people.memphis.edu/~rivercity.

Dying in the City of the Blues:

Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

By Keith Wailoo

University of North Carolina Press,

325 pp., $34.95 ($16.95, paper)

For every era, there are characteristic diseases that attract
public attention, and in every disease there are particular features that gain
cultural currency and achieve high levels of popular visibility because they
embody social concerns, cultural anxieties, and political realities.”

Obvious case in point: AIDS in the ’80s. Earlier case in point
and of vital concern to African Americans: sickle cell anemia in the ’70s. But
as Keith Wailoo (author of the above quote) explains in his important new
study, Dying in the City of the Blues, sickle cell’s nationwide
visibility beginning some 30 years ago had a visibility some 70 years ago on
the streets of Memphis and on one street in particular: Beale.

When Lizzie Douglas (aka Memphis Minnie) sang “Memphis
Minnie-jitis Blues,” was she singing not of meningitis but of sickle
cell’s symptoms? And “the blues” itself — the “low down
shakin’ chill” of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues,” a chill
born of a malaria-prone river valley, transferred to a city itself a
geographic, commercial, and cultural crossroads — was it not an emblem of one
of sickle cell’s target populations and that “invisible”
population’s predicament: Delta blacks and their quite real but
“invisible” pain?

Wailoo, an award-winning professor of social medicine and history
at the University of North Carolina, doesn’t overdo the possible link with the
blues, but he does establish the undeniable links between sickle cell anemia
and three issues of key meaning to modern Memphis history: “scientific
medicine in friction with race relations and health care politics.” All
three in local terms were to become by the ’70s, in national terms, what
Wailoo calls “a complex cultural negotiation” between what science
shows, society dictates, and leaders legislate. Read what you will into that
academic buzzword “negotiation”; Wailoo’s demonstration of disease
as “commodity,” as “politics,” and as
“narrative” are his book’s triple features. General readers need not
beware; Memphis readers, read the record:

By the 1920s, in a town H.L. Mencken once described as a
“rural-minded city” (and Wailoo adds, “arguably still
is”), Memphis was receiving a steady influx of rural blacks at a time
when the paternalistic “plantation complex” of the South was in its
last stages. And by 1926, the local VA hospital was reporting its first case
of sickle cell anemia, a disease in some African languages referred to as a
“state of suffering” and, in the VA report, a disease diagnosed
independent of the more common conclusion, malaria. Three years later, Dr.
Lemuel W. Diggs, with a “distinctly new, laboratory perception of
disease” taught to him at Johns Hopkins, was brought to UT-Memphis. The
medical school as a teaching institution was suffering; Memphis blacks, many
of them indigent and many of them complaining of repeated infections, joint
and abdominal pains, and general lethargy, were suffering too — from Jim Crow
and the substandard health care that went with it. The opening of the city’s
General Hospital and UT’s affiliation with that hospital helped answer the
needs of both: The school got a concentrated pool of patients; African
Americans got at least a semblance of professional care to compare
(unfavorably) with that of whites.

In the ’30s, however, what the author terms “new habits of
clinical surveillance” and New Deal activism (in the form of New Deal
dollars) raised not only the status of UT nationally but the visibility of
“sicklers” locally, and with it a highly “circumscribed”
visibility for blacks — as patients obviously and as nurses conceivably, as
UT-trained doctors never. Under the political machine of Edward
“Boss” Crump, the health care for blacks improved too but as an
aspect of Democratic Party patronage, until a report by the U.S. Public Health
Service listed Memphis as having the highest infant death rate in America.
Civic action immediately kicked in: in the form of John Gaston’s bequest to
build a new city hospital; in the form of postwar fund-raising efforts among
whites and blacks to build Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital; in the form
of private donations by philanthropists such as Herbert Herff and Abe Plough
to advance the ground-breaking research conducted by Diggs and Dr. Alfred
Kraus at UT; and, beginning in the late ’50s, in the form of St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital, whose mission statement explicitly forbade any
and all racial considerations.

Where did this leave sickle cell the disease? On a molecular
level, thanks to Linus Pauling’s discoveries, and on a “commodity”
level, thanks to federal dollars. Patients were growing in
“immanent” value, the “legitimizers” of research agendas.
But by the ’60s advances in scientific understanding and advances in Memphis’
international reputation as a center for sickle cell research meant also new
views of the disease, with different lessons for different observers. Wailoo
calls it the “politicization of disease” to describe Congressman Dan
Kuykendall’s successful fight to win research dollars (and black votes) in
response to his district’s redrawn boundaries and “changing
complexion,” and he quotes from others the “ethnic disease
politics” to describe the ’70s upswing in new theories of black identity
generally, new theories of sickle cell biology specifically. But with the
recent rise of managed health care and the recent advent of expensive gene
therapies, a free market caused a shift away from academic health centers and
away from sickle cell as well, a disease that afflicts and kills far fewer
than, say, hypertension.

For Memphis, the city at the crossroads of Southern culture that
had managed to make medicine central to its economy, Medicaid-turned-TennCare
meant consignment to the state’s medical-economics margin. The big bucks were
now in Nashville, courtesy of one of that city’s leading cash generators,
Columbia/Hospital Corporation of America. A loss to Memphis, then, and a loss
to the attention paid the city in the closing pages of Dying in the City of
the Blues.

But for a serious loss for readers, consider this: the absence
altogether of case histories to go with Wailoo’s account of sickle cell
science and policy, of names, faces, individuals to go with what is in every
other respect an admirable sociology of medicine. We read of doctors,
lawmakers, concerned citizens, film stars, sports stars. We read of agendas,
protocols. We read of “racial identities” and “strategies of
accommodation,” “explanatory models” and “disease
landscapes,” “forces.” We read of blood smear techniques and
recombinant DNA techniques, of hydroxyurea therapy. What we hear nothing from
are the sufferers themselves, excepting perhaps the lone lyrics of Memphis
Minnie.

Wailoo ends his book on a literary high note, borrowing from
Ralph Ellison and that writer’s Invisible Man. Unfortunate to think in
this one book especially, given Keith Wailoo’s otherwise thorough work, of
sicklers invisible here.

Demonology

By Rick Moody, Little, Brown, 306 pp., $24.95

Rick Moody

Ambitious and occasionally glorious, Rick Moody’s new collection of short stories, Demonology, is amazingly, infuriatingly inconsistent. Moody succeeds when he works to communicate the deep grief and sorrow, the worry and weariness of his characters, but when he strays from the emotional to the overly conceptual, his writing becomes pointlessly clever and woefully condescending, too concerned with surface to consider craft.

“The Chicken Mask was sorrowful, Sis.” So begins the first story, “The Mansion on the Hill.” It’s an intriguing sentence in its duality, for by “sorrowful” Moody means both pathetic and regretful: The mask is a talisman of good times long past and the bad times in which his characters are inescapably mired. Such an item appears in almost every story here, as the inhabitants find themselves trapped in bad situations that can only get worse.

After dressing as a chicken to advertise a fast-food restaurant called Hot Bird, Andrew Wakefield — the man behind the mask — finds work at the Mansion on the Hill, a wedding hall featuring a number of different chapels with names like the Ticonderoga and the Rip Van Winkle. Here, Andrew helps organize and host all types of weddings, from modest to extravagant, while steering clear of his dour, demanding boss. But in this “place of fluffy endings,” Andrew carries a “barely concealed sadness,” and Moody captures it with deep empathy, despite the story’s comic tone and satiric edge. While excelling in this regard, “The Mansion on the Hill” recalls recent works by George Saunders, who carves surprisingly moving tales from bizarre workplaces. Moody does not fare well in this comparison.

More successful is “Forecast from the Retail Desk,” in which Everett Bennett, a self-styled psychic who works at an online investment firm, claims he can see the future, specifically the bad things that will happen to the people around him. His skill, he discovers, is not a gift but a curse: Everett blames himself for all the tragedies that befall people, as if by predicting an event he directly causes it. Tortured by the horrible visions of an unchangeable future, he is likewise haunted by the grave mistakes of the past. Writing in first person, Moody creates in Everett a genuinely compelling, truly soulful character, one whose forlorn voice marks this harrowing story with a profound, lurking sadness.

The collection’s best moments come during its longest piece, a two-part novella titled “The Carnival Tradition.” In it, Gerry Abramowitz recounts a car accident that leaves him with a crippled arm, which he calls the Claw, and an addiction to painkillers. He also reminisces about his teenage years in New England, specifically a rich kid’s Halloween party that ends in a fiery disaster. This section reveals Moody at his finest, seamlessly evoking the awkwardness of adolescence during the late 1970s and creating an air of autumnal melancholy. And through prose that is both lucid and wrenching, Gerry becomes his most realistic creation, a character tragically defined by his own bitterness and defeat.

In too many stories, however, Moody’s high-concept experimentalism and dense writing style prevent the development of character, tone, and setting. “On the Carousel” uses the business language of Hollywood — net, back end, options, test screenings — to examine “whether language itself clutters up what otherwise might be simple.” Illustrating this idea is Lily, a script doctor who, while driving through Los Angeles, frets over her possibly mentally handicapped son, her job, and her husband. She pulls into a McDonald’s to buy juice for her daughter and ends up in the crossfire of a gangland shoot-out.

It’s an interesting concept certainly, but that’s all it is. To an extent, Moody develops the idea through his acrobatic, ever-intelligent prose and excruciatingly slow pacing, but since Lily is neither a realistic nor a very well-developed character, he ends up talking the idea to death.

Ultimately, Moody’s most damning sin in Demonology is that he cannot distinguish his strengths from his weaknesses. At his worst, his writing is strained and inflated, too dependent on gimmicks to adequately engage the reader. But at his best, he can be thought-provoking and highly original, his dense, often graceful prose capturing all the angst and loss of characters anchored to history.

Demonology contains some truly memorable stories, and their images and emotions stick around long after the book has been placed back on the shelf. But as a whole, it suffers a lack of cohesion and purpose that prevents it from achieving its lofty ambitions.

The Body Artist, By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 128 pp., $22

Don DeLillo is a writer’s writer. Ask many contemporary fiction writers whom they read and an inordinate number of them might answer, “DeLillo.” That’s because he has all the gifts, because he has come to represent an artistic integrity and a willingness to take risks missing from much fiction today, and because, for all his erudition, he is as entertaining as the human race. He may be the most beloved of the postmodernists. He’s not impenetrable, but neither is he Robert Ludlum.

DeLillo’s last novel was the gargantuan Underworld, a bursting-at-the-seams, complex zodiac of a novel, a book seemingly as large as its subject: the 20th century. It should have won all the major fiction awards, and, as time passes, its importance will only be magnified. Now DeLillo has followed the massive with a missive, a 128-page novella about intimacy and loss.

The Body Artist is the story of Lauren, the titular “body artist” who uses her torso in experimental performance art, and Lauren’s husband, film director Rey Robles, who dies after the first chapter. Lauren’s return to the home they shared coincides with the appearance of a strange young man, an ageless creature really, almost a blank, a human template, who is “impaired in matters of articulation and comprehension.” Suddenly he is just there in the house, seated on a bed in his underwear, as if he had been transported from another dimension.

Lauren names her guest Mr. Tuttle and begins to carry on an almost one-sided conversation with him. His replies, when he replies at all, are enigmatic non sequiturs. As the author describes it, “There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked.”

Mr. Tuttle also comes and goes like a revenant, like the birds to the feeders at Lauren’s window, visitations she is enchanted by. Soon Lauren begins to suspect that Mr. Tuttle is aping conversations she and Rey had. How long has this stranger been in the house? she asks herself. Is he really there now? Or is he just a catalyst to propel Lauren into the next phase of her life? If this is a haunting, it’s a haunting by what? She tries to capture Tuttle’s oblique statements on tape, as if preserving them is saving something: a part of Rey, a part of herself.

“His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement” reads one of Rey’s obituaries. “He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments.” Clearly, this is a precise summing-up of DeLillo’s entire, brilliant oeuvre and this new addition to his body of work. The Body Artist, ultimately, is a discomforting examination of Lauren’s search for that “life-defining” moment.

Fans of DeLillo will be delighted with this short, numinous story, a neoteric Grimm tale, an ultramodern spectralogy. The story is made up of particulars, precisely observed and described; each line meticulously crafted and essential to the whole. “[Lauren] was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already,” DeLillo writes early on, and the action of The Body Artist seems to take place between such twinklings of observation. It is a work of such refined and well-tuned writing it seems to be a high-wire act, a poem written with a switchblade.

“Time seems to pass,” DeLillo writes at the opening of the novel. “The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely …. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.”

The Body Artist is DeLillo’s most delicate work, a finely etched cryptogram, where mystery is made concrete and the concrete is made mysterious. Its magic is like Beckett’s: serious comedy built slowly and carefully, like that spider’s web. Put another way, this is a novel made of spun glass, brittle, elegant, and sharp at the edges — further proof that Don DeLillo is one of our finest and most important writers.