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“We Others: New and Selected Stories” by Steven Millhauser

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

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Are you wondering the same thing I’m wondering? Would you like to call the senior editor at Knopf to the witness stand to answer a few questions starting with this one: Why this book?

The “New Stories” half of “We Others: New and Selected Stories” by Steven Millhauser occupies just 144 pages. Does the publisher view us readers of Millhauser as an impatient lot, unable to wait the few years it would take this methodically productive author’s backlog of unpublished stories to grow from the seven found here to a total of, say, a dozen? Why not wait for enough material to satisfy our expectation for a hearty, stand-alone book of new stories? And what about the back half of the book — the “Selected Stories” compilation? Does this indicate Knopf considers Millhauser undeserving of a “Collected Stories” compilation (the treatment respectfully accorded Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Grace Paley, Deborah Eisenberg and others)?

The 14 previously published stories, which come from Millhauser’s four books of short stories, are:

From “In the Penny Arcade”:  A Protest Against the Sun; August Eschenburg; Snowmen. From “The Barnum Museum”: The Barnum Museum; The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad; Eisenheim the Illusionist. From “The Knife Thrower”: The Knife Thrower; A Visit; Flying Carpets; Clair de Lune. And from “Dangerous Laughter”: Cat ‘n’ Mouse; The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman; History of a Disturbance; The Wizard of West Orange.

Millhauser explains in his “Author’s Note” how he worked past initial trepidation to pick these pieces: “I chose stories that seized my attention as if they’d been written by someone whose work I had never seen before.” Millhauser fans may object to the omission a favorite or two from his inventory, but I think he generally made good choices. This compilation will allow a new reader to get an honest perspective on Millhauser’s work. So: the book may be an excellent gift idea.

Part of the pleasure of reading Millhauser (who is on the faculty at Skidmore College’s Department of English) is to enjoy the ways in which his literary inspirations flavor his writing. Even when his plots are ensconced in late 20th or early 21st century settings, something in the atmosphere, some note or tone, will harken back to 19th century American writers, especially Hawthorne and Poe. When a protagonist proclaims that “anxiety’s our pastime, desperation our sport,” one is reminded of the restlessness, the fevered unease (nay, panic) that seizes so many narrators of that period. Then, too, there is the author’s infatuation with T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Most boldly, in the story Klassic Komix #1 (collected in “The Barnum Museum”) Millhauser re-conceived Prufrock’s anxious meanderings in the form of a 44-panel comic book. Now, in one of his new stories, we read of a similarly drifting character emerging from his lonely room with desirous thoughts — thoughts that parody Eliot’s lines (note, for example, what happens to Prufrock’s final fantasy of becoming a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas):

“. . . one has come down from the attic in search of — in search of what? Shall we say, a pleasant encounter between two like-minded souls, in a suburban living room, of a September eve? And yet the craving to reveal ourselves spreads in us like a disease. It’s also true that we long not to be seen, never to be seen, to live out our existence — our existence! — like growths of mold in the depths of forests.”

While Millhauser is not breaking any new ground in the seven new stories, I perceived a heightened emphasis on what in one story he calls “a savage loneliness of which you can know nothing.” Opening with “The Slap” in which a quiet suburban community attempts to fathom the meaning of a stealthy stranger who randomly approaches residents and delivers a slap to their face (“we had been violated in some definite though enigmatic way”) and ending with “We Others” which is narrated by the ghost of a recently-deceased doctor who self-examines his attraction to a couple of lonely women (“our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be”), these new tales are a continuation of Millhauser’s hallmark obsessions played out within solidly crafted surreal worlds — worlds which mirror what we understand, perhaps mistakenly, to be our real world.

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An abbreviated version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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“The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

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In what ways do great children’s books influence the culture? In the era of Harry Potter the main route is via commodification. In an earlier era, influence might have taken an indirect path, mediated by contemporary literature.

Take the case of Virginia Lee Burton’s  “The Little House,” a children’s book published in 1942 that received immediate (and lasting) popular and critical success. Consider the effect its text and illustrations may have had on the imaginations of Anne Tyler and Arthur Miller.

Anne Tyler’s House

I came to read “The Little House” only recently, after learning it is Anne Tyler’s “life long favorite picture book.” Tyler explained her love of the tale in an essay published in The New York Times Book Review in 1986 entitled “Why I Still Treasure ‘The Little House’.” Tyler vividly remembers her mother reading the book to her at age four. When she became a mother herself, Tyler enjoyed reading it to her two daughters. She guesses she’s given away “several dozen copies” of the book as gifts to new babies. In a more recent written interview conducted in 2004, Tyler said she has long been in awe of how Virginia Lee Burton managed to say “everything possible about change and loss and the passage of time.” Plainly this is an example of  like attracting like, for in her own 18 novels Tyler has done the same.

In her essay Tyler mentions one thing that’s always eluded her:

I have pondered for years, for decades, over the final picture of the Little House. She’s on a hill again; she’s surrounded by apple trees again–but there is no longer a pond! It’s as if the story ended, “She lived happily ever after–but not quite.” Could it have been just an oversight? A failure on the part of the author-artist to recognize the importance of a pond? Or did she intend to remind us of the grim facts? “You can go back, but never all the way back,” she may have been saying. “What is done can be undone, but never completely.”

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The Little House (note the pond to the left) before an expanding city overruns it (page 9):

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The Little House after it is moved to a new perch in the country (page 39):

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I see this final picture differently. Only the house and its immediate lawn survive because there is only so much room in God’s heaven. Yes, I interpret the story as a Christian allegory.

On the first page of “The Little House” the reader meets a father who is described as “the man who built her [the house] so well.” With an air of omniscience he predicts the house will live forever. His prophesy includes a stern and very Biblical sounding admonition: the house “shall never be sold for gold or silver.” I think we are meant to understand this as a warning against betrayal.

A second voice appears on page 32. Many years have passed. The house has been swallowed up by the city and is abandoned. We sense we are coming to the fulfillment of the story. Or call it “her-story,” as Burton, who created all the illustrations, wittily indicates below the front door mat on the cover illustration. This new voice belongs to one of the father’s offspring. In a clever bit of misdirection on Burton’s part, it is not the father’s son, but a more distant (female) descendant, “the great-great-granddaughter of the man who built the Little House so well.” She is here to fulfill a destiny, however. She will bring salvation to a soul true and pure (we are told that while the house is “broken … crooked … shabby,” it is “just as good a house as ever underneath.”).

Study the pictures on pages 31 and 33:

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Whatever the condition of its soul, surely these are images of death. Executed in tones of gray and black (see how the fading pink of the first picture expires in the final shot), the pictures include a cross made of wood planks marking the door between dead-eyed windows.

The great-great-granddaughter’s mission is to be the house’s travel guide to what she calls “just the place” — an afterlife in a revived Eden that simulates the house’s original home set in nature. The journey is depicted in a two-page spread on pages 34-35. It is a scene akin to a traffic-stopping funeral procession:

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Look closely again at the after-the-move illustration further above — the “after salvation” picture (my preferred label) that has always given Tyler pause because of the omission of a nearby pond. Notice how Burton re-conceives the house’s surroundings as a protective island of contentment. The image is gently rounded and isolated in white space, appropriate to a vision or dream. There is a free-floating — and, to my eyes, heavenly — aura to the picture. That the house is no longer earth-bound is also suggested by how the image and text are positioned on the page. Of all the illustrations in the book, those found on the final three pages — 38 and 39 (which I view as a connected spread) and 40 — are the only places where the text is allowed to appear beneath the image. The effect is telling. The image is lifted up. It rises above our focus as we read, as if to say the Little House is no longer among the creatures here below.

You may scoff at this interpretation. I suspect Anne Tyler would too. But I think we should leave open the possibility that, within her own masterful explorations of “change and loss and the passage of time,” the caution that Tyler exhibits — a sentimental reticence to stir up all that lies at the dark bottom of the river of time — may be traced back to a comfortable understanding of the world (“rescue is possible; conditions can be reversed”) she constructed when, as a child, she listened to her mother read “The Little House.”

Arthur Miller’s House

Let me turn from armchair psychologizing to pure speculation. Consider next the case of Arthur Miller, on whom the influence of “The Little House” is, as far as I know, undocumented. Will you hear me out?

In the middle section of “The Little House” Virginia Lee Burton describes and provides illustrations of the menacing encroachment of a city, bent on swallowing up a pastoral setting. What I ask is this:

Is it a coincidence that just a few years after the release and popularity of “The Little House” and at a time when Miller and his wife might well have been accumulating children’s books to read to their young daughter, the playwright chose to write stage directions for “Death of a Salesman” that share not only the dread but the specific details of Virginia Lee Burton’s vision of the city?

As a prelude before the curtain rises on “Death of a Salesman,” Miller offers the audience what an evocation in music reminiscent of the bucolic setting in initial pages of “The Little House.” He specifies: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.”

Fast forward: the horizon has disappeared. Here is Burton’s illustration of the urban reality (page 19 of “The Little House”):

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And here is how Miller sets the scene for his tragedy:

“The curtain rises. Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides.  … As more light appears we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.”

Burton’s lament  (“No one wanted to live in her and take care of her any more”) is echoed by Willy Loman: “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.”

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[A review of “The Little House” is posted on Amazon, here.]

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“Lunch Poems” by Frank O’Hara

Friday, August 5th, 2011

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Frank O’Hara’s reputation seems caught in a holding period, an awkward stage preliminary to his work becoming universal and timeless. Consider, for example, the final scene in the opening episode in the second season of “Mad Men,” the cable TV series set in the world of advertising as practiced in New York in the early ’60s. We see the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O’Hara’s poems (“Meditations in an Emergency,” 1957). He recites the final lines from “Mayakovsky.” There is an ambivalence to the scene. Was O’Hara chosen less for the intrinsic merit of the poetry than to set an easy marker for a zeitgeist, the same thing the producers accomplish by highlighting the period-specific cut of Draper’s suit and hair? With friends like these, will O’Hara ever escape the mannerist ghetto of the “New York School“?

And so some readers may pick up “Lunch Poems” (first published in 1964) after seeing it praised as an emblematic cultural document of mid-twentieth century America. Yet even if the time-bound aura of O’Hara is the come-on, what makes you stay enthralled in his circle is his voice — a “thinking” voice as vitally American as Whitman or Frost.

There are 37 poems in “Lunch Poems” and their quality as well as their accessibility varies. The poems span a period from 1953 to 1964. This book is not a “best of” O’Hara collection, yet it does contain what may be his most durable poem.

A few of these short pieces are so recondite that they lose me. In a few others O’Hara raises an opaque scrim to suggest beauty beckoning from the other side, and these poems begin to “click” only after multiple readings. But the majority of the poems are freshly-minted coins granting immediate access to a lively, urbane worldview. While general knowledge of the New York cultural scene in the ’50s and early ’60s is helpful, these poems, at their best, easily communicate to us in a way undimmed by the passage of time.

Here is an endless succession of the poet’s friends, lovers, artists, musicians, and the parties, meals and conversation they create. Here are O’Hara’s travel experiences and his love of foreign languages (you could write an essay on the myriad uses of French in O’Hara’s poetry). The man wears his erudition lightly on his sleeve. He’s enamored by both the high and the low in American culture: “I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile” (Naphtha, 1959). Another poem from the same year, Rhapsody, contains a premonition of his early death (at age 40) a few years later: “I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death.”

Most delightful are his street-level ruminations, spinning in all sorts of directions, nurtured during mid-day breaks away from his curatorial duties at the Museum of Modern Art. A typical flight occurs in A Step Away From Them, which begins: “It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs.”

A new survey ranking the most walkable cities in America placed New York on top. Teju Cole’s recently published novel, “Open City,” set in contemporary Manhattan, is a current example of a continuing tradition of perambulating literary protagonists. A half century ago, O’Hara was walking these same streets, looking, speculating, daydreaming about the city. A fragment in an untitled poem from 1959 asks, “Where does the evil go when September takes New York and turns it into ozone stalagmites deposits of light?”

The cityscape serves as a platform for accessible philosophizing, as found in one of his best works: “The Day Lady Died”. Is there another poem where so much meaning resides in its title? At first glance the title rattled me, threw me off stride. In it I heard a rhythm, but an uncertain one. Then came the answer hit me: simply reverse “Day Lady” to reveal “Lady Day” — the nickname of blues singer Billy Holiday, whose dark night of the soul ended in 1959. The displaced “day,” her missing “day,” had to be displaced, it had to go missing from O’Hara’s page. The text of the poem recounts the day the poet walked the streets and avenues of Manhattan attending to errands. These everday events end when he spies a tabloid newspaper’s front page announcing Holiday’s death. It is the day after death, the first of many days denied her.

In the poem’s final stanza — in which O’Hara recalls hearing Holiday perform at the Five Spot Café — he accomplishes a wonder. He turns death into something other than displacement and omission. Memory overpowers death, converging time present and time past.

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(An abbreviated version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.)

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“Me, Molly Midnight, the Artist’s Cat” by Nadja Maril, illustrated by Herman Maril

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

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Like a heroine in a classic English novel who rises from lowly station to final prosperity, Molly Midnight, the feline star of Nadja Maril’s children’s book (published in 1977 and still in print), uses her wits and wiles to fulfill her destiny. Tracking her progress is as much fun (in miniature form of course) as following the exploits of her possible namesake, Moll Flanders.

Molly’s destiny is to serve as an artist’s model, and in that role she finds lasting stature. But more importantly, she achieves for herself “the same kind of peace and contentment” she sees each day on the face of her painter-protector, as he diligently works in his studio. Not a bad lesson for young listeners and readers.

The book is illustrated with reproductions of 11 paintings by the author’s father, Herman Maril. Created over the period from 1962 to 1976, the pictures are a mini-exhibition of this gentle modernist and master of color. He also made four charming new drawings especially for this book.

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I own a small painting by Maril titled “Circus Horse” (gouache on light blue tinted paper, 1940). It pre-dates the paintings illustrated in “Me, Molly Midnight” by several decades, but is a good example of how brilliantly Maril could apply his fluid style to create a captivating picture of an animal.

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A master of seascapes, landscapes and still-life works, Maril is an American artist who deserves to be better known. Currently on view at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (until August 30, 2011) is an exhibition of 40 of his works.

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“After the Fall” by Arthur Miller

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

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Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall” takes the form of an investigation into the forces which give rise to incomplete and destructive human relationships. The play’s protagonist, Quentin, in whose mind the play’s set pieces take place, subscribes to the simple rule: “You tell the truth, even against yourself.” The play is fabricated as a trial or, more fittingly, an inquest. Here the moralist (and retired attorney) Quentin sits in judgment upon his own conscience, his own values, his own actions:

“You know . . . more and more I see that for many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you are young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful, or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That one moved not in a dry circle but on an upward path toward some elevation, where . . . God knows what . . . I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict, anyway.”

Quentin zeroes in on distorted emotions, marital complexities, and other intimate struggles. As a result, “After the Fall” becomes a big, demanding drama (when staged, the play usually occupies a full three and a half hours), doggedly exposing Quentin’s “pointless litigation of existence” in order to find not only whether his has been a life “lived in good faith,” but whether he can move beyond self-condemnation to some measure of hope. His tortured process of self-discovery fights against an unwillingness, an innate fear of unearthing what Miller calls “the seeds of his own destruction.” It is the fundamental need to know that serves as the backbone of what is otherwise a loosely structured play. And, whether you are a reader or are in the audience, you will likely be engrossed, since this is your journey too.

At the same time we are learning of events in Quentin’s life, a universal drama unfolds. Miller’s intent is for “After the Fall” to be a broader study of mankind’s terrible predisposition to cruelty, his evasions of responsibility and remorse. In the “present time” of the play, Quentin is considering marrying a German woman who fled the Holocaust, and whose experiences led her to accept human blindness and failures. She helps him universalize his own understanding, in a scene in which he pauses before an imagined concentration camp tower rising above him:

“And I am not alone, and no man live who would not rather be the sole survivor of this plan than all its finest victims? What is the cure? Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls? I tell you what I know! My brothers died here . . . but my brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these stones! And what’s the cure!”

Miller is striving to enter into a dialog with other essential pieces of twentieth-century literature. T.S. Eliot in the poem “Gerontion” (1920) asks: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” At the close of “After the Fall,” Quentin, responds:

“I wake each morning like a boy — even now, even now! I swear to you, there’s something in me that could dare to love this world again! . . . Is the knowing all? To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax and fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love — as to an idiot in the house — forgive it; again and again . . . forever?”

Again and again: There was something in Miller’s plea that reminded me of similar words uttered impromptu just four years after the opening of “After the Fall.” Before a stunned audience in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the evening in 1968 when the world heard the news of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy spoke. Without notes, at first haltingly but then with earned authority, Kennedy said:

“We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, to go beyond these rather difficult times . . . Aeschylus once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of god.’ What we need . . . is not division . . . not hatred . . . not violence and lawlessness . . . but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice . . . . ”

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“The Curfew” by Jesse Ball

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

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Jesse Ball’s third novel, “The Curfew,” is not as ambitious, experimental, or beholden to meta-fictional devices as its predecessors. The new book is more accessible. Shorter too: “Samedi the Deafness” contains 279 pages of text; “The Way Through Doors,” 228 pages; while the “The Curfew” flows fast at 193 pages. At its heart is not a hallucinatory cat-and-mouse game (Samedi), nor a whirling dervish of endless tales (TWTD) — material a few readers found wearying. Here, instead, is an elemental story, set in a perilous universe, of protective love between a father (William, 29, “once-violinist, now epitaphorist”) and his eight-year-old daughter, Molly. You are likely to be genuinely moved.

Upon reaching the end of “The Curfew” I was reminded of Guillermo del Toros’s film, “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006). In both the novel and the movie we follow a bright and sensitive girl who has been left to her own devices (one parent lost, the other distant) and who now must deal with a violent world overtaken by fascism. In both tales, the trappings of fantasy and fairy-tale become the young girl’s defense against terror and real human misery. Del Toro has explained that elements of his film came from his childhood experiences with “lucid dreaming.” Jesse Ball, also, practices lucid dreaming, and he teaches a course on the subject at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (He also teaches courses on “False Identities” and “Lying”.) One predictor of your potential enjoyment of “The Curfew” may be whether you were enchanted and moved by “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

Although the pull of “The Curfew” is more emotional than ever, the author has jettisoned his other signature interests. The things Ball does well in all his fiction he continues to do in “The Curfew.” He gives readers permission to pay attention. He knows how to conjure up off-kilter and perilous environments (here, a military coup has reduced an American city to a condition of pervasive terror). As before, he relies less on the traditional moorings of the novel and more on his own bizarre and generous wit to propel the story. He trusts the reader’s own imagination similarly will rise to the occasion. Saying less means saying more.

Consider, for example, William’s forte as an writer of tombstone epitaphs. His skill rests in finding the right, few words to memorialize a life, or in one case, the right, few words to impart as much about the circumstances of a death as can be borne by the surviving parents:

LISA EPSTEIN

9 years, 24 days.

In the street by our house, it was almost evening.

Ball also knows how to exploit the design of the page — judicious use of empty space, breaks, inserts, irruptions of very large type — in service to the story. He gives you permission, and the opportunity, to pay attention. His prose, though not ostentatiously lyrical, becomes beautiful through his command of rhythm. (No surprise: he is a poet, after all.)

Reading “The Curfew” you come upon many a grace note, many little notes of wisdom: “Magic is either a poverty-stricken necessity or a wealthy fantasy.” “She felt as many well-brought-up people do that her life is a collection, that she is always collecting.” “The effect of irrational beliefs on your art is invaluable. You must shepherd and protect them.” “There’s nothing like the embarrassment of cats.” And — I’m going out on a limb here — I believe Ball was chaneling a memorable dialog moment from “Groundhog Day” on page 33 (compare it to the Phil? Phil? scene, found here) and echoing the “Wizard of Oz” in a guarded-entrance exchange on page 28 (compare the “Why didn’t you say that in the first place!” scene found here.)

While Molly’s perspective is understandably that of childish discoveries, this is something also shared by her artistic father:

For the first time in a long while, William looked down and saw his hands. If you have had this experience, you’ll know just what I mean.

Later, remembering his career as violinist (now forbidden by rulers who’ve abolished music), William reflects on the tension between reality, play, and art:

There is a space in the playing of a virtuoso piece where the violinist must cease to think about the music, must cease thinking of fingerings, even of hands and violins, where the sound itself must be manipulated directly. At such times even to remember that one has hands, that one is playing, is disastrous.

One question the reader of “The Curfew” may be left with is whether Ball has selected the right vessel for his content. He relies heavily on elements of stageplay writing, and of screenplay writing. Music and sound are important. You will encounter the wise old director of the puppet play that occupies the final third of “The Curfew,” who expresses this worry: “There is the matter of what is the glue to hold it all together; I’m not sure this will do.” Would the author’s presentation of “The Curfew” work better in another medium?

But, then, maybe Ball has already responded. The puppet play director explains: “If one person can control every aspect of the performance, then nothing need be lost. Nothing!”

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Notes:

1.  I found the idea of an art form that “gives you permission to pay attention” from a Paris Review Daily piece by Lorin Stein, here. Stein writes: “One thing I like about poems is that you are allowed to stare at them, and think about them, for as long as you like. In this sense, they resemble slow movies, or portraits, or nudes, or most of what we think of as art: poems give you permission to pay attention to a degree that would be rude or embarrassing face to face with, for example, a person.”

2.  Jesse Ball’s website (with drawings by the artist) is here. An interview by with the author on the occasion of the publication of “The Curfew” appears online at The Millions, here. Another short interview which exposes how prolific this fellow is, is found here. A revealing interview from 2009 (on the release of his second novel, “The Way Through Doors,” is found here; it delves into lucid dreaming and Ball’s influences, including film. Ball reads one of his poems (?) in the video, here and (same video) here. Then there’s this video (featuring the inspiration for Molly?).

3.  A shorter version of my review is posted on Amazon, here.

4. An very enthusiastic review of “The Curfew” by a literary blogger (“When High Praise Isn’t Enough”) is found here. The Fiction Advocate finds a moral dimension (and life lesson) in the book. A laudatory review from NPR, here. The New Yorker weighed in (briefly), here (alas, subscription required).

5. Others disagree. One is Michael Herbert Miller, who finds “The Curfew” to be the “least fulfilling” of his novels: “Clever, yes, but it does not make for a thrilling read. (…) Ball is a breed of anti-Flaubertian …”.  Another not-so-enthralled review is found here.

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“How Do You Hug a Porcupine?” by Laurie Isop and Gwen Millward

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

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The storyline of Laurie Isop’s “How Do You Hug a Porcupine?” follows a simple and naturally pleasing formula. One by one, eighteen children pair up with one or more huggable animals.

What ensues is a festival of the warm-and-fuzzies.

Featured are a dog, cat, horse, cow, pig, ostrich, giraffe, bunnies, a yak and more. Coming in last is the most challenging of the potential hug receivers: a porcupine. But, Hooray! Undaunted, one little boy accepts the challenge. A big heart and patient ingenuity (hint/spoiler: his clever solution involves some well-placed marshmallows) are all it takes to succeed. The book’s final page delivers us into a warm embrace.

All of this activity is captured in Gwen Millward’s sweet, 1950’s-style illustrations, created with pencil, ink and watercolor. Her pictures will bring smiles especially to baby boomers who are now grandparents. Notable are several views of the porcupine with quills extended, and one of an elephant modeled in washes of gray. If your child or grandchild is a budding artist, and likes to draw animals, consider this book as a means to inspire her or him to learn the ways of watercolor.

A Spanish translation by Argentina Palacios Ziegler appears just below the original English on each page. Ziegler favors communicating the original text’s meaning, rather than slavishly duplicating its meter or rhyme scheme. (Her only arguable misstep occurs when she chooses to use the verb “de vomitar” to convey the idea of the boy’s stomach “feeling kind of queasy,” just so she can rhyme the previous line ending, “va a dar.”)

The moral of the story is as old as the New Testament and as ever-relevant as the Golden Rule: We must try to find a way to muster our courage and reach out to those who, because of some seeming difference, appear unapproachable. And yet there is nothing heavy-handed about the message in “How Do You Hug a Porcupine?” It is one of those books that can inspire, from young readers and maybe the listener in your lap, both childish and non-childish thoughts.

NOTE: The version of the book I read was one of 3 million free copies found in Cheeries boxes this Spring. It is a small paperback (7″ x 5 ¼”). On July 26, Simon & Schuster will publish a larger, hardback edition, but in English only. Expect copies of the bilingual version to pop up at used bookstores, such as stores on Amazon, here. Additional background from General Mills/Cheerios can be found here. Laurie Isop talks about her book in a video posted here.

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“Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003” by Roberto Bolaño

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

This collection of non-fiction pieces is a treasure-trove for anyone who has read Bolaño’s fiction and who came away smitten by the author’s vibrant, mercurial, poetic voice.

Some elements of Bolaño’s novels and stories — their settings, aspects of their storylines, their narrators or chief protagonists, and their spirit of inquiry — are grounded in autobiography. This is especially true of the novels, “The Savage Detectives” and “Antwerp.” Bolaño’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, who has assembled the 125 pieces found in “Between Parentheses,” addresses this subject in his helpful Introduction to the book: “This volume amounts to something like a personal cartography of Roberto Bolano and comes closest, of everything he wrote, to being a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography’.”

Stated more broadly, there was, for Bolaño, no bright line between fiction and non-fiction.

What this means is that seasoned readers of this author will comfortably enter and enjoy the world of these essays, speeches, newspaper columns, travel articles, and other occasional pieces. If the reader perceives anything different it is that here the voice they have come to expect — opinionated (“plagiarists deserve to be hanged in the public square”), argumentative (a writer friend praises John Irving, but this is “an enthusiasm that I don’t share”), passionate (his love for his soon-to-be-orphaned son shines bright), and a bit of a rapscallion (“one of the best ways to steal . . . I had learned from an Edgar Allen Poe story”) — is even closer to the essence of “I, Roberto Bolano.”

In a piece from 1999, the autodidact Bolaño declares: “I’m much happier reading than writing.” His admiration is clear whenever he’s able to mention that this friend or that acquaintance “has read everything.” As for the scope of his own reading and interests generally, this is demonstrated by a nine-page Index that completes “Between Parentheses.” The Index contains the names of over 600 persons, including musicians, filmmakers, and artists. But mostly there are authors, among whom is a strong contingent of Americans Bolaño read with critical fervor.

These pieces were written during the period after he had been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease that in 2003 would take his life. It is no surprise, then, that a theme he returns to time and time again is the question of what constitutes a well-lived life. When describing someone’s accomplishments, for example, if he wants to impart his ultimate compliment he will write, “. . . and he was also a good man.” (George Orwell is one such man.) His critical gaze does not spare himself, his foibles and his imperfect works. In contrast, politics holds little appeal (although there are a few columns about the situation in his native Chile). When, in the final piece in the book, he is asked by an interviewer what things bore him, he answers: “The empty discourse of the Left. I take for granted the empty discourse of the Right.”

We learn that “By Night in Chile” was originally titled, “Storms of Shit.” He tells us we should consider “The Savage Detectives” to be “a response, one of many, to `Huckleberry Finn’.” At one point he declares: “Everything I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the 1950s.”

There’s his easy humor too. Attending a poetry reading, Bolaño notices the auditorium is “filled up with freaks who seemed to have just escaped from a mental asylum, which incidentally is the best audience a poet can hope for.”

His free spirit is everywhere. In speeches and essays ostensibly devoted to a specific subject, he wanders off path, pursuing diversions that lead to further diversions, which then are interrupted by a confessional revelation, or an informal bit of chat. The reader wonders, is this explained by a discovery Bolaño made as a youthful soccer player, now revealed to us — that he was “left-footed but right-handed”?

The aphoristic bent so characteristic of his fiction is on constant display: “Writers write with their hands and their eyes.” “Crime seems to be the symbol of the twentieth century.” “Literature is basically a dangerous undertaking.” “Books are the only homeland of the true writer.” He speaks of the impact of “fate — or chance, that even fiercer beast.” Every few pages a striking declaration stopped me short, such as this biographically-grounding insight capping his interpretative essay on “Huckleberry Finn”: “Twain was always prepared to die. That’s the only way to understand his humor.”

It occurs to me that it might be said that Bolaño, like the American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, found himself most productive, most freely communicative, when operating in the gap between art and life. There’s a good chance you’ll discover, while reading “Between Parentheses,” that this interstitial volume gives as much pleasure as anything else you’ve read by this author.

About this book as physical object:  It is compact but not small, feels sturdy and is comfortable to hold. The book is signature-bound, a traditional bookbinding method that has the practical effect of allowing the opened book to stay flat for your perusal, rather than springing shut. (Your hands don’t have to fight this book; it will likely survive use without warping.) The impression I come away with is that the editor and publisher meant for it to become a permanent addition to your library — a plan Bolaño, who was covetous of his personal collection of books, surely would be pleased with. There is no dust jacket, however. Using the same design approach it applied to “Antwerp,” the publisher, New Directions, has chosen to emboss the title, author, translator (the consistently excellent Natasha Wimmer), and other information on the front and back covers, this time using a striking, iridescent raspberry color on a black ground. In addition to the helpful Index, the editor has supplied an 11-page Sources section, with explanatory notes (Bolaño had filed copies of most of the original texts on his computer).

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An alternative version of this review appears on Amazon, here.

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“Orientation and Other Stories” by Daniel Orozco

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

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“This book has been a long time coming,” Daniel Orozco writes in the Acknowledgments page at the end of “Orientation and Other Stories,” his terrific collection of nine short stories. The book gathers up all of the pieces Orozco has published thus far in literary magazines (both print and online), starting with the title story which he wrote 17 years ago.

Recently, Orozco was interviewed by the local newspaper in the town of Moscow, Idaho, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. He described his painstakingly slow path in composition, during which he might spend a week writing a paragraph and a month writing a page. This was, he said, “a way that makes me feel comfortable about moving on.”

It is no surprise, then, to find every one of the nine stories in “Orientation and Other Stories” to be of consistently high quality. That consistency does not come from Orozco chaining himself to one comfortable formula or style. No, he manages to pull something different and original out of the hat at each performance.

Thematic links do appear among the stories. Although he can be satirical (especially in several of the stories that take place in office settings) and flat out hilarious (as in the farcical mutual seduction of two cops in “Officers Weep”), Orozco’s overriding interest is in deadly serious matters: what it means to be alive (“this feeling that you’re part of a world with other people in it, and that you matter because somebody else seems to think you do’); why are human connections so difficult (“You can’t know anybody, not really, not in the brief overlaps of flimsy acquaintance, nor in any of the tenuous and fleeting opportunities for connection that we are afforded”); how living our modern, pretend lives (building imaginary connections) dooms us (“you get where you are by yourself’). Yes, much of this is bleak, depressing. Some of these stories will make you shiver in self-recognition.

If you’ve previously read one or more of Orozco’s stories, you probably don’t need any persuading. But if not, and you want to get a taste of his writing, the “Click to Look Inside!” book feature here on Amazon will give you access to the first eight pages of the first story. A complete version of the story is available elsewhere online (search the three words, Orozco Orientation nomrad). Want more? The fourth story in the collection, “I Run Every Day,” is available for free, in its entirety, at All-Story, the online literary magazine supported by the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (search the two words, Orozco Zoetrope). That story will begin to impress you with a remarkable thing Orozco has mastered as a writer, even in the small compass of these short stories: how to slow down or speed up the reader’s sense of time, in the service of the narrative. This is especially felt in “Somoza’s Dream,” in which Orozco, the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, imagines the life in exile of the Nicaraguan dictator. He “stops time” at the moment of Somoza’s gruesome assassination. Time speeds at the end of “Only Connect,” as a woman somehow harbors, for decades, an act of moral cowardice.

Fine touches are encountered in each story. In “Shakers,” a minor earthquake shakes old mortar off the ceiling of a prison dining hall, where it sifts down onto the prisoners, “dusting the tops of their heads like cannoli.” The best employee working for a Temp agency is granted “the assurance of permanent temporary employment.” A master at conveying the personal atmospherics of the workplace (Orozco notices how newcomers get tagged with nicknames, like “Baby” or the “I Don’t Know Girl”), he is equally observant describing the physical environment. Here is an office at the end of the week: “. . . the inevitable sound of an empty office–the enormous quietudes of Friday that roll through the corridors and lap into the conference rooms and cubicles like a submerging tide.”  He seems fond of exotic insects: a walking stick here, a helicopter damsel there. Even mechanical equipment can be anthropomorphized: “Overhead, security cameras mounted atop thirty-foot poles turn slowly, taking in the perimeter with ho-hum weariness.”

Additional notes:

1.  There’s news that Orozco is under contract with the publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to complete a novel he started back in 2005 while living in a small town in West Texas. The settings will trace his personal journey as an adult: San Francisco, Washington state, and “a fictional town very much like Moscow.”  Its release date is still “a few years out.” In the meantime, the current book, “Orientation and Other Stories,” shows Orozco’s progress toward a psychological and moral accounting of our lives today. Count me as one who looks forward to reading his long-form report.

2.  Significant reviews of the book are found here and here. Revealing print interviews of the author are found here and here (in the first, from 2006, Orozco describes his work habits and ends by quoting Colette: “Who said you should be happy? Do your work.”). A 15-minute radio interview conducted at WNYC Radio in April is available for listening here.

3.  An abbreviated version of my review of “Orientation and Other Stories” is posted on Amazon, here.

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“The Coffins of Little Hope” by Timothy Schaffert

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

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Timothy Schaffert’s “The Coffins of Little Hope” is a bang-up novel: smart, funny, sad, and magical.

The book’s intelligence, its melancholy, its subtle, down-home humor, and its manifold charms, are exhibited in many forms. There’s the unsentimental depiction of small rebellions in a small town in Nebraska, where “everything falls apart.” There’s a page-turning mystery about the fate of a missing 11-year-old girl named Lenore who may or may not be real (yes, the name is an allusion to Poe, and not the only one in the book). There’s a clever subplot involving the secret publication of the final volume of a best-selling series of Young Adult Gothic novels whose plucky protagonists, Miranda and Desiree, have captivated many in the community. There’s a light, fairy tale dusting that covers the town and its inhabitants, casting a spell that gently dislocates the reader’s sense of what exactly is going on. There is, front and center, the rueful yet wise voice of the novel’s 83-year-old narrator, Essie Myles, matriarch of the town’s newspaper and writer of its obituaries. Her spirit, simultaneously sinking (“I’ve come grim-reaping”) and unsinkable (“I’m happy to be sad”), dominates the book.

Let me add a few observations to the growing praise the novel is receiving:

The narrator, her philosophy and her family

The first is to note the rare quality of the narrator’s voice. In contemporary fiction the outlook of youth or middle-age predominates, and so it is refreshing to come across a successful novel grounded in the perspective of old age. Over the course of what Essie calls her year of “minor havoc,” the two people she holds most dear — her 38-year-old grandson, Doc, and her 14-year old great-granddaughter, Tiff — grow and change. But Essie remains, steadfastly, Essie. This means the book traces the slow unfolding of her essential self, contradictions and all.

Essie combines the wisdom of age with a writer’s appreciation for how contradictory terms often appear in conjunction. It is through Essie that Schaffert makes sport of this oxymoron called life. Not a page goes by without some remark about incongruities, pluses and minuses, the unavoidable either/or of living. Essie sees a man’s “gruff demeanor, which disguised his sweet, soft heart.” She observes how middle age has rendered Lenore’s mother “wasted and lovely both.” It frustrates her to realize that “now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she’s doing the right thing.” She spies a man “strumming an unplugged electric guitar.” At a funeral of an old friend, while sitting with her remaining pals, she confesses, “we were nearly moved to tears by our own lack of emotion.” So here is a test:  If you grow bored around the elderly when they start in talking about their philosophy of life, steer clear of “Coffins.” If, on the other hand, you miss a grandmother who stood her ground, spoke her mind and remained sharp to the end (and you miss her), then I think you’ll get hooked by this book.

A second notable aspect of “The Coffins of Little Hope” is how much it is about family. Essie begins Chapter 8 with a chart of her family tree. She is obliged to label it, “Little Family Tree,” since it has been reduced to only four living members. The most poignant relationship in the book is the loving bond between Essie and Tiff (though we are aware of the gap of seven decades between them). At times I was reminded of the sundered, incomplete families found in the novels of John Irving and Anne Tyler’s novels.

Shades of John Irving, shades of Anne Tyler

The Irving connection is felt in the violent accidents that chopped off limbs from Essie’s family tree, the sort of shocks that are a routine part of Irving’s generational sagas. At one point in “Coffins,” Tiff mistakenly hears the word “undertow” — which recalls the “undertow/under toad/unter tod” motif in “The World According to Garp.” Of course, no one can best Irving when it comes to being an “author lover” who must, in every novel, include a main character and/or supporting characters who are writers of some sort: novelists, journalists, children’s book authors, diarists, family historians, etc. (On this point, check out the chart of “Recurring Themes” in the Wikipedia article on John Irving, here.) In “Coffins,” Schaffert launches a challenge to Irving, marshaling the obit-writing Essie AND the reclusive Wilton Muscatine (author of those Miranda and Desiree books) AND the dead but still resonating lady novelist of the Plains, Myrtle Kingsley Fitch AND Lenore’s mother Daisy whose alternative M&D manuscript Muscatine covets.

As for the connection to Anne Tyler, Schaffter’s examination of Midwestern family dynamics made me think of Tyler’s Baltimore which, as portrayed by her in novel after novel, somehow still feels like a small-town. Schaffert even includes a version of Tyler’s trademark comic scenes — the awkward moments that arise when a member of a tight-knit family dares to bring home to a family meal someone new he’s met. Other echoes of Tyler are found in the early mid-life crisis of Essie’s grandson Doc; the nostalgia some characters express about a past filled with better days; and some characters’ clasp of the quotidian in hopes of holding time’s swift hand back. A kinship between Schaffert and Tyler is also evident in the finale to “Coffins,” which brings the reader to the cusp of a wedding (a ploy both writers smartly steal from Jane Austen). And I could have sworn I was reading a page out of Tyler when Schaffert closes chapter 54 with this “she-leaves-in-a-huff” ending to a family breakfast:

“Penny for your thoughts'” Ivy [Essie’s grand-daughter and Tiff’s mother] said.

“I’ve always hated that expression,” [Essie] said. “It’s aggressive. And what’s worse, it’s disguised as a little piece of friendly adorableness in needlepoint stitch.”

“Wow, tell us what you really think,” Ivy said.

“I hate that expression even worse,” I said. “Practically for the same reasons.”

I then caught sight of them all exchanging quick glances and raised eyebrows, as if they were collectively declaring me a senile crank. “You think I don’t see that?” I said, making matters worse.

So, if Schaffert’s book tour should bring him to Washington, DC, and if the event allows for questions, I’ll bring to the microphone this one: “Mr. Schaffer, what do John Irving and Anne Tyler mean to you?”

An abundant writer

If there is a fault to be found in “The Coffins of Little Hope” it is that Schaffert’s elliptical path travels through all too many stations, its narrative has all too many diversions. So the reader must be willing to encounter a variety of riches, for that is what you get with Schaffert. On every page, he displays an easy wit and imagination, relayed through an engaging writing style. Once again, it is Essie who provides the starring “voice,” best of all when she unspools regional colloquialisms and some bad puns. She’s embarrassed by her “disgraceful fur coat, a mink that had long been on its last legs.” She describes her grand-daughter’s escape to Paris: “Ivy had just up and left.” She admonishes herself for an “infantile need to know everything before everyone else.” Schaffert’s applies an economical hand to character descriptions and scene-setting: “Ivy mourned her parents by falling in love, dangerously so, with a man beautiful but demented, and she then became pregnant.” Someone else’s daughter “had married poorly, ruined her life early on, and thickened herself on bad food from drive-through windows.” Note, too, the author’s tidy parallelisms: The Miranda and Desiree series comprises eleven books and “Coffins” contains eleven “Parts.”  (BTW, there is a webpage devoted to M&D, here.) On page one, Esther Myles informs us that if she were to reduce her full name to just one letter, the surviving letter would be “S” — a condensation also befitting the author.

This guy is good and this book is a delight.

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[A shortened version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.]


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