Gilead is told in two distinct sections. The action unfolds in Gilead, Iowa in 1957. In the first half of the novel, we learn that John Ames’ had a wife and daughter who both died in childbirth. Decades later, Ames falls in love with Lila, an uneducated and much younger woman. Like his father and grandfather before him, John Ames is a preacher. He baptizes Lila, they are married, and at the age of sixty-nine Ames has a son with his new bride.

Ames sketches the town’s early days as a haven for abolitionists in the late nineteenth century. Grandfather Ames was a follower and protector of John Brown, and lost an eye in the bloody skirmishes leading up to the Civil War, leaving him half-blind. But the elder Ames’ militant actions and fiery sermons ended in violence and death for many in his congregation, causing a generational rift in the Ames family. This idea of inherited, original sin becomes the bedrock upon which Robinson constructs the gripping psychological drama that will unfold in the novel’s second half.

Ames initially presents himself as the perfect father figure: calm, reasonable, tender, forgiving. His wife and son are idealized in his thoughts and prayers. With a philosopher’s powers of perception, Ames is trying to show his young son the light that has guided him for so many years:

Ames loves his infant son unconditionally. Or so it seems. But the preacher’s equanimity feels less than honest. He’s holding something back. We soon discover that another man carries John Ames’ name – the young John Ames “Jack” Boughton. Jack is the son of Ames’ best friend, the ailing Presbyterian minister Reverend Robert Boughton. And Jack’s back in town to visit his own dying father.

Jack is the proverbial prodigal son, a recovering alcoholic with a mean streak who seems to ruin everything he touches. In his youth, Jack Boughton had an illegitimate young daughter who died from neglect – a sin our narrator refuses to forgive. Even the mention of Jack’s name is enough to send Reverend Ames into paroxysms of doubt and anger.

Within a few pages of meeting Jack Boughton we understand that John Ames is facing the most important struggle of his life. The love Ames professes for his own son can only be truly unconditional if the preacher can find a way to love, and forgive, young Jack Boughton for his youthful transgressions.

If the first portion of the reverend’s diary gives us a glimpse at the light of his steady and simple faith, the next is a complicated exploration of his doubts and misgivings. It is not a journey our narrator accepts willingly. The preacher often tries – and fails – to communicate with young Jack, cowed by his failing health and lifelong animus toward the young man. But time is running short, and a failure to be honest with himself, with his son, and with the reader will have repercussions for Ames’ very soul:

It is not enough to embrace the light, Robinson argues. This is only part of the picture. Those who never use that light to illuminate the shadows are walking through life like Ames’ grandfather, half-blind. Even the darkest hearts are beautiful, and worthy of God’s unconditional love. If we are up to the truly heroic task of looking past our own shortsighted selves, the author argues, we will be rewarded with the gift of real sight.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

The recently published Library of America collection of Carver’s work, Collected Stories, gathers multiple drafts of the authors’ more memorable stories together, including the full manuscripts of Beginners and WWTA. In his early days, Carver’s work was dark, depressing, even murderous at times. Babies are killed by squabbling parents, men murder their wives and sisters, alcoholism runs rampant, and infidelity offers more intimacy than the brutality of the marriages described here. Carver was a practicing alcoholic in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the tales he wrote during this time reflect the hopelessness and despair which drove him to drink.

Lish saw in Carver’s stories “a particular bleakness”, took the emerging author under his wing, and championed his work with the New York literary establishment. Lish edited and published Carver’s initial short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet Please, in 1976. Then in 1977 Carver went on the wagon. He divorced his first wife, moved in with the woman who would become his second wife, and started a daily regimen of writing that would continue until his death, in 1988, of lung cancer.

In Beginners we see a man and an author struggling to come to terms with his past. Where his earlier stories were barebones set pieces highlighting the more disturbing aspects of suburban, working-class life, the stories Carver wrote after 1977 are more nuanced. The characters in Beginners still struggle with death and guilt and divorce and depression. They wonder where things might have gone wrong. But many of Carver’s initial drafts also describe people attempting to rebuild their lives, seeking some sort of meaning in a savage universe.

In May of 1980 Carver delivered what he considered to be the final manuscript of Beginners to Lish in New York City. Several of the stories had been published before. Indeed, Lish had previously edited many of them. Lish read the manuscript, reached out to Carver, and asked if he could tighten the collection as a whole. Carver told him “not to worry about taking a pencil to the stories if you can make them better.”

Five weeks later Lish mailed Carver the revised manuscript, freshly edited and renamed What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver did not read the manuscript, and the book was put on “the fast track” for publication. Lish continued editing, assuming from Carver’s vague reply that everything was moving ahead as planned.

The editor continued to work. He cut Carver’s total word count by 55%, removing what he saw as “false sentimentality” to “foreground the bleakness”. Lish removed entire pages of text, saving a word here, a phrase there. One story was cut by a whopping 78%. Lish added hard-hitting and insightful lines of dialogue, characterization and setting. He changed the names of characters. He wrote new (and now famous) lines. He changed titles, tone, effect, endings. He changed everything.

When Raymond Carver finally got around to reading the manuscript, he was understandably floored. He wrote Lish a frantic, heartfelt letter asking to be released from his book contract. The letter is reproduced in the Library of America collection, and in it Carver says:

There is and will continue to be a longstanding debate over Lish’s role in Carver’s career. On one side of the fence, there are those who believe that Lish’s editorial license was a toxic sort of power grab. Stephen King called it “baleful”, and said of Lish’s work on the story “The Bath” (which was originally titled “A Small Good Thing”) that it had been “a cheat.” On the other side, there are those who say that the differences reveal in Gordon Lish a particular kind of brilliance. The New York Review of Books said: “The publication of ‘Beginners’ has not done Carver any favors. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish.”

Having now read them all, I believe Gordon Lish took good stories, then transformed them into brilliant and haunting works of art. Carver was just beginning his recovery from a desperate life. He was reinventing himself as a man and author. But the sentiments he was exploring had yet to be fully realized. He seemed to be writing in order to heal his own tortured soul. But Carver was just starting to heal, just beginning. Whereas the horror and despair were still evident, waiting like a cancer for someone to come along, cut them out, and hold them up to the light.

After WWTA secured Carver’s fame and fortune, he asserted new control over his relationship with Lish. Lish eventually broke off their relationship, and Carver went on to explore his newfound sobriety in one heartfelt story after the next. “Cathedral”, about a blind man who teaches an insensitive husband the concept of empathy, is such a story. Carver had finally matured – as a man, a husband, and author – and “Cathedral” might be his finest tale in the collection.

Artists create for many reasons. Editors revise for many more. But in the end, readers don’t really care about the reasons. Readers want to be entertained, titillated, shocked. They want stories that stick with them for days and months and years later.

Carver’s sparse stories, as edited by Lish, do just that.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

O’Brien’s tales play fast and loose with the facts. At times he uses real names, assuring the reader he has received permission from his old war buddies. At other times the plots can veer freakishly off into the realm of horror or genre fiction. And just when we think we’ve gotten our bearings, O’Brien tells us he’s been messing with our heads all along: “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

What is true is that, as a young man, Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War. He considered fleeing to Canada, but found that his sense of shame wouldn’t let him go through with it. And so the author went to war because he was ashamed not to. He became close friends with the soldiers in his unit. He fought. He cowered. He saw people die. He might have killed someone. And when he came back, Tim O’Brien began to write, trying to wrap his mind around the paradox that was Vietnam. “War is hell,” O’Brien writes, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

In the title story, “The Things They Carried”, the author inventories the belongings of every soldier in his unit, mementos and photographs and toothbrushes and weapons and “pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.” The inventory moves quickly from a listing of physical objects to the awful weight of the war, the guilt and shame and depression and rage that these soldiers will carry for the rest of their lives, assuming they make it back home.

Once home, O’Brien writes stories as a kind of talk therapy. In a combat zone, the author argues, imagination can get you killed. The soldier needs to be present, aware, on constant alert. Stateside, though, imagination can bring the dead back to life, heal psychic wounds, and begin to spin a more resonant emotional truth from the chaos. Below is the entire text of one of the stories in this collection, entitled “Good Form”:

A recurring theme in this collection is the big fish story. Soldiers in war tell whoppers: ghost stories, battle stories, stories about getting laid, stories about what it will be like to get home, stories about dreams and nightmares they’ve had. They tell the stories in order to bond with one another, in order to calm themselves down, in order to capture the horrible essence of their predicament in the combat zone. As the author continued to rely upon this frame tale technique, I was reminded of Scheherazade, the storyteller in “One Thousand and One Nights”, stringing her executioner along with one imaginative tale after the next. Like Scheherazade, Tim O’Brien guides the reader through an increasingly enchanting dreamscape with each successive story in this collection. It’s a place where long-gone friends come back from the dead. It’s a place “where miracles can happen.” It’s a place where the weak have a voice, and where wrongs can be made right.

O’Brien writes here as if his life depended upon it. And in the end, it does: “I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning treatise on nature, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard manages to see something equally breathtaking, nearly every day of the week. The essays here are, as Eudora Welty writes on the blurb, “a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing.”

When I came upon the burning bush in my own creekbed, I did not understand at the time that I was witnessing the annual migration south of the Monarch butterfly. It was only later, in biology class, that I connected the teacher’s lesson plan to the vision I’d witnessed, and finally knew what I had seen. Dillard does much the same thing in her book, stationing herself in a stream or a field, hoping to capture some mystical image on the photoplate of her mind’s eye. Then she rushes home to her cabin on Tinker Creek, in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains, and hits the books, doing her level best to understand the science behind, history of, and meaning implied by these fleeting spectacles, “the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.”

Dillard is trying to open the reader’s own eyes to the divinity implied by the intricacy of this natural world. The author presents her argument in two distinct parts, told over the course of a single calendar year. We begin with winter, and a building amazement at the joy that is creation. We learn seemingly trivial details: how Eskimos bury a knife slathered in frozen seal blubber, then lie in wait for a wolf to “lick it compulsively with numbed tongue, until he sliced his tongue to ribbons, and bled to death”; how some clouds can be seen reflected in water, but are invisible in the sky, because “polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light in clouds isn’t polarized”; how “the sense impression of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain,” which gives birth to an interesting philosophical conundrum, “since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

But these aren’t trivial facts. One of Dillard’s key points is that, unless you understand what it is you’ve seen, you haven’t seen it. “You get what you see,” is her mission statement, and she wants us to see it all. With humor, compassion, and grace, she impresses upon the reader the importance of faith … in God, Buddha, Muhammad, Yahweh. Whatever you want to call it, it’s out there, she argues, ready and waiting to change your life, if you’ll let it.

After spending the first half of her book acting as a kind of ecstatic safari guide, building up the reader’s amazement at the interconnectedness of all things, the author shifts into a more introspective gear. In the afterward to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Dillard says of the book’s two-part structure:

Every argument has two sides, and like any good philosopher or scientist, Dillard examines the flip side to awe. In part two, the author begins to deconstruct the sense of joy she’s built up, and investigates the complex interweavings between life and death, joy and sorrow, beauty and pain. We learn of parasites and snakes, injury and deformation, sickness, plague, and death. Dillard reveals an absurd irony: evolution, which enables and sustains life, depends upon death as a kind of macabre fuel to ensure that future versions of us can keep kicking, and wondering why we’re here:

Annie Dillard is trying to wrap her mind around an essential paradox of what it means to be human, and alive. If before you were blind, and suddenly you see – now you have a responsibility to make meaning out of the color patches floating in front of your eyes. But making meaning means getting dirty, in the thick of it, where the answers don’t come easily. This book is a challenge to the reader, a call to adventure. She almost dares us to come along for the ride:

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

But Suttree’s hopeless neighbors are funny, and it’s a welcome departure for readers familiar with McCarthy’s work. Suttree plays the straight man to an assortment of drunks, criminals, witches, transvestites, goat herders, fortune-tellers, scam-artists and delinquents, people subsisting at the very fringes of society. The characters here rely on a homespun brand of black humor to cope with their dire circumstances along the dying Tennessee River, where the homeless frequently freeze to death in the cold winter months, or fall prey to the ravages of alcoholism or violence or poverty or racism.

In particular there is Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets in the workhouse after the boy is imprisoned for sexually assaulting a field of watermelons (the guards call Harrogate “the moonlight melon mounter”). Harrogate is a deviant, unfit for society. But Suttree quickly strikes up a friendship with this misfit, becoming a sort of father figure to the boy because “he’d never heard the city rat tell anything but the naked truth.” Camping in a warren of caves beneath the viaduct downriver from Suttree’s houseboat, Harrogate draws Suttee into several comic get-rich-quick schemes, one hilarious scene involving a slingshot, strychnine, and hundreds of dead bats.

The sparse banter between Suttree and Harrogate provides comic relief to the darker indulgences of the author and his mind-bending style. McCarthy writes English as if it were German, fusing words together to generate some wholly new noun or verb or adjective: “bullbats” are “bandywinged”, “stainedglass” is “particolored”, “shorelight” is “sundabbled”, and “teethfillings” are “toothblack”. McCarthy relies on language that evokes the power of myth, Latinate words and elaborate, complicated sentences that can’t help but curl themselves into the gloomier regions of the heart. When Suttree isn’t making us laugh, he is contemplating the afterlife, his many sins and failings and limitations. The effect is of a soul fallen from grace, of someone who remembers what it must have been like to be a happy, moral, responsible person … but whose pride or addiction or depression now prevents him from climbing out of the Hell his life has become.

At times, reading Suttree, you’re reminded of Mark Twain and his elegies for life on the river. McCarthy’s novel is a sobering mirror to Twain’s more optimistic vision. These characters, like Twain’s, are stoic and curious individualists. Before settling into boring, cookie-cutter lives they want to experience adventure, become one with nature, live life to its fullest. But where Twain explored the vibrant life on the river, McCarthy delves into the subterranean depths beneath it, sending Harrogate on a fool’s errand in the sewer tunnels under Knoxville in search of riches. “He had not known how hollow the city was,” writes McCarthy, before Harrogate nearly meets his end in a river of sewage.

Here is Suttree and an old, fatherly ragpicker, discussing life and death on the river:

Suttree moves with a steady, concentrated gaze through the dying world around him. It’s a world where the simple act of perception – which is so often taken for granted in this age of technological distractions – becomes, in and of itself, a heroic undertaking. A place where every leaf and twig and shadow is imbibed with double meaning, with portents of things to come:

The tension driving Suttree is the disconnect between the title character’s kind-hearted and intelligent personality and the dumb fate he has somehow embraced. “I was drunk,” is Suttree’s defense whenever confronted with the stupidity of his past actions. Early on in the story, McCarthy describes what must be the most painful hangover in the history of literature. But the reader doesn’t buy Suttree’s halfhearted excuses, and fortunately for us McCarthy gives us a glimmer of hope near the novel’s conclusion, as Suttree decides to leave Knoxville and travel out into the wider world, take responsibility for his future and grow, finally, into a man.

Having a mind and then allowing it to rot seems to be McCarthy’s definition of the abyss. Fortunately for us, this author is still bending his own exceptional mind to the task of writing one infernal, well-spun tale after the next.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Reading this collection cover to cover, we watch as Boyle imitates, reacts to, and interacts with major literary and philosophical movements, mastering the written word along the way. Boyle doesn’t just read the great works, he incorporates them into his own stories, often updating the characters and situations with some post-modern twist. Whether he’s commenting on the beat writers (“Beat”), the Cold War politicians (“Ike and Nina”), the Dadaists (“Dada”), Gogol (“The Overcoat II”), or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (“Mexico”), Boyle isn’t afraid to topple heroes from their pedestals, imagining them as regular old folk: proud, inconsistent, often hypocritical … but also vulnerable, tender and (usually) likeable.

From the first story, “Modern Love” (a courting couple is so frightened of becoming infected with some virus or bacterium that their dates involve a battery of blood tests, finally the awkward protection of a full-body condom), to the last, “Filthy With Things” (a pair of compulsive hoarders seek intervention from a diabolic lifestyle coach, hoping to end their addiction to shopping), Boyle’s stories are drunk on language, with a refreshingly experimental approach to style, theme and point of view. This stylistic and thematic variation notwithstanding, many of Boyle’s stories are concerned with the raw power of nature. Boyle’s characters are always seeking either thrills or shelter from the creeping, crawling, oozing, implacable forces of nature – in doomed relationships, in downed airplanes, upon isolated mountaintop watchtowers, or behind the walls of concrete bunkers designed to withstand societal collapse.

But nature always seems to triumph in the end, mostly due to our all-too-human vanity, which lets us feel separate from the environment, somehow above it all. Here’s an excerpt from the hilarious “Descent of Man”, where a man competes for his girlfriend’s attentions with an unusually evolved primate:

And later, when our hero’s girlfriend brings this same chimpanzee home for dinner:

In perhaps the most absurd and touching of these stories, the high-concept “Sinking House”, an aging widow allows her faucets, garden hoses, and sprinkler system to run non-stop for weeks. The woman’s next-door neighbor – a young housewife addicted to Pilates – begins to notice water seeping up through her own foundation, and discovers the sinking house next door. The neighbor confronts the seemingly oblivious widow (“Water?” she said. “What water?”), and we begin to understand that this woman has survived fifty years of domestic abuse. The police are summoned, and the widow is institutionalized. It is only after she is gone that the young housewife ventures next door, recognizing the similarities between her own fate and the widow’s:

“All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” the comedian Lenny Bruce once said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline.” T.C. Boyle is mining the same vein as Lenny, conjuring worlds that defy categorization: at once absurd, dangerous, scary, gross, farcical and – above all – funny. Like the woman in “Sinking House”, Boyle writes in order to empathize with his neighbors. He tries on styles, explores absurd situations, toys with literary conventions … all “just to see what it felt like”. This trial and error approach delivers the reader, in the end, to a more perfect understanding of the universe and our place within it.

“We’re all gonna die!” Bruce is rumored to have wailed into the microphone.

To which Boyle replies: Might as well die laughing.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Cheever’s genius is in his ability to create rich and (mostly) sympathetic characters, show us how circumstances or social norms have built around each one a kind of psychological solitary confinement, and then explore how they might try to escape from, rise above or (more often) simply endure this private, existential prison. In the early stories, Cheever is writing as a realist, inviting us along to posh summer vacations by the sea, where upper crust families entertain themselves with passive-aggressive mind games fueled by gin and familial discontent. Readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald will recognize in Cheever’s characters the yearning that arises in those who rub shoulders with the wealthy – dreamy losers trying (and often failing) to gain access to the glamour just beyond their grasp.

The women in this collection typically fall into one of two categories – there is the bitter, acid-tongued harpy who abandons her family to pursue another passion (like an education, say, or a job); and the virginal baroness or princess, perfect in every way, impossible for the mere mortal to obtain, way up there on her gilded pedestal. Marriage is not just a prison sentence, it is a murderous evolution of the mind-games played by the sea … a fight to the death between the sexes, where fathers and mothers “put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.” Here is a Cheever character in “The Ocean,” wondering if he should eat what might be a poisonous dinner, cooked for him by his wife:

Cheever’s characters are often at war with themselves, wondering how to reconcile their natural impulses with the requirements of social convention, not wanting to “offend the order of things”. When the author lets his imagination off the leash, abandoning realism for a kind of Kafkaesque commentary on suburban life and its discontents, the stories become magical, almost mythical, in their effect. In “The Death of Justina,” for example, a man has to battle an absurd zoning restriction after his mother-in-law dies, an entirely natural condition which has apparently been outlawed by the zoning committee:

In what might be the most famous Cheever story (“The Swimmer”), Neddy Merrill awakens one summer’s day from an alcoholic stupor beside a friend’s pool. In a flash of insight Neddy realizes “that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water”, and decides to leap the fences of his neighbors and swim home via a succession of backyard pools. Along the way, Neddy interrupts quiet Sunday afternoon barbecues and cocktail parties, apologizing to his open-mouthed neighbors as he invades their privacy and dives into their waters. Time and memory seem to contract as Neddy swims his way home. Entire seasons pass – summer changes into fall and finally into winter. Neddy grows tired, but persists in his absurd journey homeward, even after sensing that a tragic epiphany awaits him there. Returning home after an absence of what has seemed like years, Neddy finds a crumbling house, long since abandoned. “He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.”

“The Swimmer” shows us a protagonist at sea, trying desperately to maintain his public composure while feeling wholly divorced from the society in which he moves. In Cheever’s works, water represents a whole host of things – at times memory, baptism, opportunity, life, sex, and death. Water, rivers, the sea – these are chaotic, ever-changing elements. Cheever’s characters turn to them in order to sustain themselves, to find the courage required to endure yet another day in the prisons around them. The sad and beautiful thing about “The Swimmer” is the sense that, unless we address the larger problem of the prison and the way it makes us feel, the restorative swim in the water eventually loses its power to heal. Self-knowledge is required to break down those walls, and since so few of Cheever’s characters attain enlightenment, few of them come away from their dip in the chaotic, turbulent sea feeling truly refreshed.

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing,” Cheever writes. “Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness.”

Or, to put it more simply, from his story “Artemis, The Honest Well Digger”:

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

The story is as relevant today as when it first appeared, in 1871. George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, who adopted the sobriquet to ensure that her works would be taken seriously by a society in which women were viewed as second-class citizens. It’s a story where fiscal discipline is equated with morality, where uncontrolled spending forces the characters to downsize and live within their means, and where real communication and compromise are essential to the spiritual growth of the Middlemarch residents.

And so, without further ado, a mashup imagining an end-game to the U.S. debt ceiling negotiations, borrowing heavily from George Eliot’s masterpiece “Middlemarch”:

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

The story is told in five mysterious parts, many of them featuring love triangles between emotionally stunted characters trying to make sense out of an increasingly threatening world. In “The Part About The Critics,” we meet an international troupe of literary critics – one each from Spain, France, Italy and England – all of them obsessed with a reclusive German author named Benno von Archimboldi. Traveling from one obscure literary symposium to the next, the four form a fast friendship that soon evolves into kind of sad love triangle between the English critic Liz Norton and her sometimes lovers Espinoza and Pelletier, Spanish and French critics more interested in the idea of intimacy than the thing itself. The trio travels to Mexico, hot on the trail of Archimboldi, leaving the crippled Italian critic Morini behind in Europe.

But once in Santa Teresa, Mexico (a fictional border town symbolizing Ciudad Juarez), the critics are overwhelmed by the hostile landscape, where “the sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower” and the children playing soccer resemble “a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death.” We learn of the “murder epidemic”, the femicides, and soon everyone’s dreams are invaded by ghosts, strange and evil portents of things to come. Liz Norton flees the country, returning to Europe, and the elusive author Archimboldi is never found.

In part two, “The Part About Amalfitano”, we meet the Chilean exile Amalfitano, a middling intellectual trying to raise his beautiful daughter in Santa Teresa, the murder capital of the world, where women and girls regularly disappear from dance clubs or short walks to and from work, their bodies found days or weeks later in the desert. After his wife abandons him for a poet (another sad love triangle) then descends into madness and sexual perversion, Amalfitano accepts a teaching position at the University of Santa Teresa, which is like “a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It was also like an empty dance club.” In order to cope with his exile and his concern for his daughter Rosa, Amalfitano entertains “make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape.” These fanciful ideas sustain him, forming what might be the core conceit of the novel itself:

Exiled from his country, abandoned by the mother of his child, fearing for his daughter’s safety, Amalfitano succumbs to paranoia. He hears disembodied voices, warning that Rosa is in imminent danger. And in the next section of the story, the pulp-fiction-inspired “The Part About Fate,” we learn that Amalfitano’s worries aren’t without justification. Bolaño introduces us to the black American sports reporter Oscar Fate, visiting Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match for the African-American interest magazine Black Dawn. Fate learns about the murders, and that “no one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” He requests permission to write about the epidemic. But his editor is only concerned about the boxing match, and Fate’s request is denied. After the match, Fate becomes mixed up in a boozy after party, tagging along as the third party to yet another strange love triangle to save Rosa Amalfitano from what surely would have been a horrible fate.

In part four, “The Part About The Crimes,” Bolaño recounts with forensic detachment the atrocities being committed against women in Mexico. It’s a horrifying read, almost three hundred pages of stomach-churning detail: rape and torture and mutilation and sodomy and stabbing and murder and hopelessness, page after page, one woman or girl after the next, in brutal succession. Several scenes here made me physically ill.

Bolaño takes us on a kind of ghostly tour of Santa Teresa, the bodies serving to bring the surrounding slums into sharp relief. Santa Teresa seems to exist outside of time, populated by invisible, disposable workers hoping to make a better life for themselves in the maquiladoras, or across the border in the United States. Where the love triangles in the earlier portions of the novel feature emotionally battered people, the three forces at play in “The Part About The Crimes” are sex, power and fear – fear in every conceivable incarnation:

The vicious feedback loop of femicides is fueled by money and power, facilitated by a whole host of people: apathetic policemen, sociopathic drug lords, vicious pimps and corrupt politicians. “They’re all mixed up in it,” observes Amalfitano at one point about his neighbors. Bolaño’s own outspoken literary and leftist opinions led to his voluntary exile from Chile, and many of his characters wander, like exiles, from one locale to the next, trying to navigate a world where culture and national identity have been ground down by the massive rumblings of global commerce.

The story of Klaus Haas, a huge blond German with “the footsteps of a giant,” is the thread stringing the final three parts of “2666” together. We are introduced to him in part three, see him captured, accused, and imprisoned in part four, and come to understand his significance in part five, “The Part About Archimboldi”. In lyrical language recalling European mythology we are introduced to the young German Hans Reiter, a gentle giant of a boy who is raised with his sister Lotte by a one-eyed mother and a one-legged father. Reiter is conscripted into the German military and ends up fighting for Hitler’s forces in World War II, where his dazed approach to combat is mistaken for German bravery. Introduced to literature by a well-educated friend, Reiter escapes an American P.O.W. camp after the war, changes his name to Benno von Archimboldi, and starts to write.

For those who manage to survive “The Part About The Crimes,” this final, beautiful section of the novel is like stumbling on an oasis in the desert. Archimboldi is mixed up in yet another love triangle, alternating between his two loves: the emotionally unstable Ingeborg and a former baroness he first glimpses as a child, then encounters again during the war, and finally meets for brief liaisons for the remainder of his career. Archimboldi is a recluse, running from a murder he commits after the war, disappearing into hiding only to surface in remote locations with a new manuscript, stories focusing on human suffering – how we endure it, how we survive it, and what it means. And so of course, in the end, he is drawn to Santa Teresa, to Mexico, and to Klaus Haas, promising his sister Lotte that he will “take care of it all” for her, get to the bottom of the horrors unfolding in the desert.

This is a brilliant and fearless novel, a political novel exploring how individuals manage to cope in a post-national world, where individuality is often sacrificed in the name of progress, or in the advancement of ideology. Literature, the text seems to imply, offers a tool we can use to impose some sort of order onto the mess. Bolaño argues that art – far from being the product of an idle mind – is one of the most effective weapons we have in an ongoing struggle against a history increasingly blind to human suffering. Viewed through that lens, every writer (and reader, too) has a duty to ask and answer tough questions. So many of us choose to do just the opposite, to turn a blind eye to the big questions, enabling situations like the murders in the Sonoran desert to continue:

Because these “minor works” not only waste our time, they obscure the real combat happening in the masterpieces. The big questions that need to be asked and answered. “Behind every answer lies a question … Behind every indisputable answer lies an even more complex question … Only in chaos are we conceivable.”

Go big, then. Or go home.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

There’s Lee’s mother Marguerite, forever begging for understanding: first from truant officers and social workers, then policemen and judges, and in the final analysis directly to the reader, to posterity itself. There are the disgruntled CIA operatives – Win Everett, Lawrence Parmenter, and T.J. Mackey – each harboring an almost religious hatred of Castro (and now Kennedy) after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. There’s ex G-man Guy Banister, playing at detective in New Orleans alongside the strange, cancer-stricken shadow of David Ferrie. In Dallas there are silk-suited Mafiosi and the gorgeous train-wreck of a human being Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel Club, where burlesque dancers like Baby LeGrand sleepwalk through boozy strip routines and dream of other, better lives.

And then there’s Lee, of course, the itinerant maladroit at the heart of the story. Sullen and awkward, in thrall to the Communist utopia promised in the writings of Marx and Engels, Lee Harvey Oswald cultivates “a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect.” Abandoned by his father as a child, then raised in squalid, too-tight quarters with his mother Marguerite, Lee drops first out of school, then society, and finally America altogether – fleeing his post in the Army in a misguided attempt at emigrating to Russia.

Hovering over the narrative is Nicholas Branch, the CIA analyst assigned the Sisyphean task of piecing together the past, a job he quickly understands is an exercise in futility:

Unlike Branch, DeLillo isn’t cowed by the sheer volume of data surrounding the Kennedy assassination. He is making a serious effort at understanding the forces that converged on Dallas during the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” He knows, though, that focusing too closely on the particulars – the who and what and where and when – might blind the reader to the more important question … the why behind the plot. Brief scenes hint at the specifics (which we are intimately familiar with, anyway), while carefully-crafted metaphor and distinct, quirky characterization breathe life into this cast of long-dead characters.

By highlighting the feelings over the facts, “Libra” offers the reader a sort of emotional catharsis which, in the final analysis, makes sense out of the whole mess.

Everyone here wants to be heard, to make some mark on history. “Happiness,” Lee writes, “is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.” And yet they are often frustrated in their pursuits: dragged down by the drudgery of daily life, frustrated by careers gone awry, hobbled by addiction or pride or stupidity. And so they tell themselves stories – latching onto what might have been, wondering privately what might still be. Continually trying to reinvent themselves with narrative. Sometimes the gaps between these private desires and objective reality can be written off as ambition. Other times they’re sad, bordering on delusional. “But idealists,” muses a Russian KGB agent about Lee, “are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by the lies they’ve told themselves.”

This back and forth between observable fact and the private, intangible fictions we entertain – between what is and what might-have-been – is the narrative fuel propelling DeLillo’s plot. Into the space existing between make-believe and reality steps the conspiracy: to stage an assassination attempt on Kennedy – a “spectacular miss” – that will galvanize political support for another invasion of Cuba. Nobody knows all of the details, obscured by layers of bureaucracy and double-talk designed to protect the participants from accountability. “A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain remarks … it was like a class project in the structure of reality.”

And like all plots, there is blood waiting for the reader in the end:

“Libra” illustrates the viral power of collective desire, the toxic effects that our narcissistic delusions can have once loosed in the real world. In it, DeLillo has captured an essential aspect of the American soul, introducing us to a cast – not of stoic, isolated killers – but of stubborn storytellers, dreaming big.

According to DeLillo’s logic, however, the yarns we tell tend to end in murder.

Killers, then. Once removed.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.