Category: Books

Sylvia and Ted

By Emma Tennant

Henry Holt, 192 pp., $22

One of the most well-known scandals in literary circles is the suicide of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the subsequent condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, by Plath’s myriad fans. He is blamed for driving her to ruin, though she was admittedly suicidal from an early age, much like poor Virginia Woolf. Hughes, even today, decades later, is commonly booed at his readings. He’s been called a murderer in public. His surname is regularly chipped from Plath’s tombstone. Now, Emma Tennant, in fictional form in Sylvia and Ted, has lent her voice to the fray, and anyone looking for a more equitable approach must look elsewhere. Tennant, another of Hughes’ ex-lovers, is not exactly an unbiased chronicler — she wrote about her affair with Hughes in her book Burnt Diaries — and here she portrays Hughes as something just short of a demon, adding another suicide to his résumé. The author’s note at the beginning of the book is worth quoting in full: “Sylvia and Ted is the story of the twentieth century’s most famous — and most tragic — love affair, the marriage and separation of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Events described in the book are based in fact, and in the case of the story of Assia Wevill, Sylvia’s rival, who also committed suicide, many of the facts were previously concealed or unknown. Sylvia and Ted is, nevertheless, a work of the imagination.”

Okay. But what is most unreasonable, perhaps, is not Tennant’s agenda, which is quite clearly to pen a fictionalized account of the affair and cast Hughes in the role of Iago, but her hysterical and hyperbolic tone. Is this affair really the 20th century’s most famous and tragic? Of course not.

Tennant continues this overwrought approach in the book’s opening section, where she sketches a few quick incidents from the three characters’ childhoods. About Hughes’ childhood she writes: “In the boy’s childhood there is killing. The love of killing, the acceptance and necessity of killing. How can he tell what he must kill and what should be left alive?” The connotation is heavy-handed at the very least. And later, when Sylvia is a young poet in Cambridge and headed to hear a newly acclaimed British poet named Ted Hughes give a reading, Tennant writes: “Thus does Sylvia go forth to meet her doom.” This is melodrama, unfiltered and vitriolic.

Tennant’s portrait of the poets’ marriage is bleak, sad, and lacking any spark of love, yet we know there must have been some tenderness. Surely there is in the worst of marriages. “There is something wrong,” Tennant writes, “a wrongness that lies dormant. What is it? There is a silence and heaviness in Ted, who will sit an hour on the hillside, playing God with a colony of red ants.”

The author has concocted for her fictional biography an appropriately elliptical and poetic language, and she is capable of some beautiful and spare sentences. Unfortunately, overwritten excesses counterbalance these. “And, then the winter came, with Assia glowing in the heart of it like a red-shaded bedroom lamp you just can’t turn off” is an example of the kind of awful and attenuated writing she exhibits here. One wishes she had kept to her pared-down approach and tempered her telling with equipoise and wit, with some concrete storytelling. Sadly, the book smells of recrimination.

Example: “Sylvia has tried not to see this man as a killer. But she knows by now that he cannot walk across this land without the knowledge of where his next victim may lie: rook, pigeon, rabbit, hare. Ted kills, and he loves to kill.”

Get the picture? Tennant is writing with a sledgehammer. There is no light let in on her constricted view; the claustrophobia and dread, which may very well have characterized Hughes and Plath’s marriage, translates here into a story with no hallways off the main room of hell. There is only a straight line to unrepentant desperation: “His wife is caged,” Tennant writes, “her only freedom a further lunge downward to obscurity.”

Enough.

There is the stuff of a good novel in this tragedy of two poets coming together and creating one life that then splinters and sends insecure, sad Sylvia to her self-destruction, but Sylvia and Ted misses it by a wide margin. This brief book is a house of cards, an empty house, flimsy, short-lived, and insubstantial.

Emma Tennant, for all her damning implication, never really makes a tangible case against Ted Hughes. The question remains: Did his infidelity alone drive his wife to suicide? Or was it his “bloodthirsty” personality? After finishing Sylvia and Ted it’s hard to remember even one scene. And that’s the worst of it: Tennant, probably because of her contrived and vindictive intention going in, has failed to make two real people come alive for the reader.

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.

Life’s Only Promise

By Sid Kara

PublishAmerica, 269 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Sid Kara’s debut novel, Life’s Only Promise, is clearly a labor of love; a passionate cry against injustice by a young and idealistic writer.

Set in the Mississippi of the early 1900s, Kara’s book details the hollow promises of Emancipation and how they have already turned sour a few decades after the Civil War. Just as novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicted the harrowing, brutal world of slavery, Kara’s novel takes us into the harsh, subterranean world of chain gangs and forced labor.

Weaving historical fact with fiction, Life’s Only Promise tells the story of a black sharecropper named Fulton Chapman who leaves his home in 1905 in the hopes of finding a better life for himself and his young daughter, whom he leaves behind while he goes to find work on the railroad. A series of mishaps results in Fulton being wrongly convicted and leased to Parchman Farm, where he and the other “gunmen” are to pick cotton for the state.

Brutalized by the guards, tormented by the merciless Mississippi summers, weakened by the wretched living conditions and scarcity of food, Fulton endures the surrealness of his new surroundings. For a long time, only the memory of his old home and his waiting daughter sustain him. But as year piles upon year, the memories and hopes of reuniting with his family dim.

An aborted escape kills the last iota of hope in Fulton. The prisoners are tracked down by militiamen. Fulton jinxes his own escape by coming to the rescue of his beloved old friend, Moondog. Many of the recaptured prisoners die of their wounds and many others are lynched. Watching Moondog’s lynching freezes something inside Fulton’s heart and he spends the next several years in total silence. The squalor, violence, and brutality of Parchman have taken the energetic, hopeful young man that Fulton was when he entered the plantation and turned him into a dull, deadened, middle-aged zombie.

Kara, a native of Memphis, is particularly effective in describing the attitudes of a racist South in the first half of the 20th century. The sheer worthlessness of black life is made amply clear, as is the racial superiority and economic avarice that allowed places like Parchman to exist.

His portrayal of J.K. Vardaman, the racist governor of Mississippi, is particularly effective. Kara captures the combination of prejudice, malice, connivance, and populist bluster that elected Vardaman to the state’s highest office. And he shows how racism requires the collusion between politics and business interests in order to survive.

But Life’s Only Promise does not treat its black characters as one- dimensional victims. Over and over again, we see Fulton’s friends, such as Moondog and Corliss, display a fighting spirit. Much as their slave ancestors did during the slave rebellions, the gunmen refuse to go gently into the night and indeed go to their deaths with dignity and defiance. We also see that the yearning for freedom is as intrinsic as hunger or thirst and that this yearning propels Fulton and the others through their darkest hours.

Some of the passages in the novel that describe the treatment of the gunmen are so graphic and blood-splattered that they make the reader flinch. Occasionally, the violence borders on gratuitous but then one remembers that violence was the story of black men’s lives. Still, in the hands of a more mature writer, these passages could have been handled with more sophistication and sensitivity.

Kara’s youth comes through in the writing. For every passage that is smooth and direct, there is another where the writing is wordy, bombastic, and over-the-top. The phrase “unfulfilled dreams” pops up at least three times. Flowery sentences like “He felt the schism between his selves begin to buckle under the force of his memories, and he felt that he was losing control over the architecture of his being” are distressingly common and take away from the trajectory and emotional heft of the novel. Kara could have clearly benefited from a strict editor.

On the other hand, Kara has a good ear for dialogue. The rural Southern dialect and colloquialisms are realistic and never strained. They go a long way toward giving the novel its depth.

Kara, who graduated from Duke University in 1996, apparently gave up a career as an investment banker in order to finish this novel. He is already working on a second book that deals with the international trafficking in women. These are serious subjects for a young author to be tackling, and it is heartening to see that Sid Kara has avoided the pitfalls that besiege many a young writer: He has avoided the temptation of his first novel being a coming-of-age, thinly veiled autobiography.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso, 150 pp., $22

Exactly who and what is Dr. Henry A. Kissinger? Key expert in
government at Harvard in the late 1950s? Key instrument of Republican Party
politicos in Indochina in the mid-’60s? National security advisor under Nixon
and Ford? Secretary of state under Nixon and Ford? Engineer behind Nixon’s
trip to China in 1972? Nobel Peace Prize co-winner in 1973? The answer, of
course, is all of the above, and all of the above, of course, is on the
record.

But, off the record, what manner of man is he? “An odious
schlump who made war gladly” was novelist Joseph Heller’s
assessment of Kissinger in Good as Gold. “A mediocre and
opportunist academic” intent on becoming “an international
potentate” is Christopher Hitchens putting it mildly in The Trial of
Henry Kissinger. Putting it not so mildly he also calls Kissinger (in
short) “a stupendous liar” and (at length) “a man at home in
the world and on top of his brief” but a Candide too: “naive, and
ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events,” a man whose writings and
speeches “are heavily larded with rhetoric about ‘credibility’ and the
need to impress friend and foe with the mettle of American resolve” but
one who, “in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in crime
and fiasco, … rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional
servants.”

Humiliating country and countrymen may mark Kissinger the man,
but Hitchens means to mark Kissinger a master criminal, which, if you follow
the complicated paper trail that Hitchens documents in this book, could and
should land the good doctor in an international court of law. The crimes,
according to Hitchens, are these:

1) Kissinger’s deliberate sabotaging of Johnson’s Vietnam
peace plan in Paris in order to get his own man, Nixon, elected in 1968. Four
years later, Nixon presents the same plan and ends the war, and an additional
31,205 American servicemen and 475,609 of the enemy forces lose their lives.
In that same period, more than 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian
civilians are unnecessarily killed, injured, or rendered homeless.
(Congratulations, Dr. Kissinger, on that Nobel!)

2) Kissinger’s tacit approval of: A) Pakistan’s takeover
of Bangladesh in 1971 and B) the kidnapping and murder of Bangladesh’s
democratically elected leader. The “secret diplomacy” that kept the
country destabilized for the following four years — four years during which
somewhere between half a million and 3 million Bengali civilians (estimates
vary) were killed — had two aims: U.S. interest in a Pakistani intermediary
who could speed a possible détente between the U.S. and China;
America’s interest in showing China that we stand by our friends and Pakistan
is a friend. (Screw India.)

3) Kissinger’s “direct collusion” in the U.S.-
financed and U.S.-armed 1970 kidnapping and murder of General René
Schneider of Chile, who opposed any military interference in the free election
of Salvador Allende as president. Hitchens calls this act, plain and simple,
“a hit — a piece of state-supported terrorism” designed to
destabilize the democratic government of a country with which the U.S. was not
at war. (Good going, General Pinochet!)

4) Kissinger’s advance knowledge of a plan to depose and
kill Cyprus’ president and overthrow its democratic government — this in
order to satisfy the territorial hunger of the dictatorship in Athens and to
protect U.S. air and intelligence bases in Greece. The coup in 1974 led to the
deaths of thousands of civilians and the uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees.
(Sorry, Cyprus.)

5) Kissinger’s (and Gerald Ford’s) full knowledge and
support of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, during which a
combination of mass slaughter and deliberate starvation resulted in the
deaths, according to Amnesty International estimates, of 200,000 people.
(Congratulations, General Suharto!)

6) Kissinger’s personal involvement in a plan “to
abduct and interrogate, and almost certainly kill,” a Greek journalist
working in Washington who vocally opposed his country’s authoritarian regime
and who vocally reminded readers of that regime’s financial ties to the Nixon
White House. (So sorry, free press.)

Is this sordid stuff really only the stuff of realpolitik,
whatever the world hot spot, whoever the U.S. head, wherever the goon squad?
Or are we talking here, when we talk of Henry Kissinger, about a clear and
still-present danger? About crimes against humanity, crimes beneath the
heading “business as usual” (aka “diplomacy”) as enacted
by a pudgy man with a zombie countenance but a man with (Hitchens’ words)
“the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power”?

You be the judge because someone has to be and because it won’t
be, officially, the United States, which believes itself immune from the truth
and reconciliation commissions being conducted by “lesser” nations
today, immune from international human rights laws, immune from international
criminal law, and immune from the law of civil remedies, a country only too
happy to continue dressing Kissinger up in what Hitchens calls “the cloak
of immunity that has shrouded him until now.”

“Until now” because Hitchens, who treats this material
with none of his easily digestible,Vanity Fair brand of broadside,
means to dress Kissinger seriously down, whether you can or cannot keep up
with the chronology of events Hitchens describes, can or cannot keep tabs on
Kissinger’s highly profitable and private, big-business deals, can or cannot
decipher the damaging evidence in the often heavily redacted CIA cables, White
House journals, declassifed documents, and memorandums he heavily quotes, can
or cannot keep count of the shady doings of the Kissinger-headed “40
Committee,” or can or cannot distinguish between an already-seedy
“Track One” line of diplomatic skullduggery from the even seedier
parts one and two of “Track Two.”

Henry Kissinger has deeded his papers to the Library of Congress
on the stipulation that they not be examined until after his death. If
Christopher Hitchens doesn’t do the doctor’s reputation in, time can tell and
just maybe justice will. — Leonard Gill

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 you’re blindfolded. Providing narration
for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly
alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of
Monstruary.

Rios’ 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 Joyce’s
— 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 Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-
series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but
one thing in common: chilling imagery.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la
Bosch before his brush touches canvas: “Ill-assorted multitudes of human
figures with the heads of animals and all kinds of beasts and insects with the
heads of men and women. … A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch. A
carp with the head of a duck.”

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details
of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re 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 narrator’s 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:
“That 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.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll 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 meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if
you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton
candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside
the car at all times. — Jeremy Spencer

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

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

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.