The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong (trans. by Kristen Gehrman)

Posted on May 15, 2020 by pagesofjulia

This sensitive novel illuminates women who love women in pre-World War II Holland.

Originally published in 1954, Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine was a groundbreaking portrayal of lesbian lives in Holland just before the outbreak of World War II. This updated translation from the Dutch by Kristen Gehrman retains what is fresh, understated and moving in the original.

Bea, a shy office worker and the narrator of this story, keeps to herself and considers social activity a chore, until she meets Erica. Within weeks, they become roommates, and Bea is increasingly fascinated by her heedless new friend: Erica, a journalist, keeps strange hours and doesn’t seem to sleep. Her moods vacillate. Over many months, the pair becomes close, and Bea is simultaneously obsessed and resistant to her own feelings, telling herself that independence is paramount. “I could no longer live without her, and with her there was nothing but the strange existence that had been predetermined.”

As the threat of a German invasion grows, Erica gets involved with several female lovers, often in abusive relationships, while Bea plays the loyal friend always there to bail her out of trouble. On the brink of war, realizing that Erica is half Jewish and engaged in risky behaviors, Bea takes a half-step toward recognizing what they share. “She never spoke those few words again…. We’ve accepted it, each in our own way.”

The tone of The Tree and the Vine is often backward-looking and elegiac, told at a distance of years. But the immediate events of the women’s lives feel frantic: Erica rushes about, Bea panics. What is most important almost always goes unsaid.

The prose can occasionally feel a bit stilted, or involve a bit more telling than showing; but in fact what is shown, often, is not actions or expressions but Bea’s own deep feeling and anguish. The result is a love story on the brink of war in which the love never quite steps out in the open and the war remains off-stage. A sense of looming, momentous events pervades this slim novel.

In a thoughtful translator’s note, Gehrman notes linguistic peculiarities of de Jong’s original: anglicisms and words and expressions from the French, for example, which Gehrman has worked to maintain, and her delicate handling of Dutch idiom. She argues that The Tree and the Vine is not just a lesbian novel but “reflective of a broader female experience.” By turns emotional and restrained, this powerful story indeed offers valuable perspective on the human experience.

This review originally ran in the April 23, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 sandwiches.

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reread: The Stand by Stephen King

Posted on May 13, 2020 by pagesofjulia

My copy of The Stand runs 1,153 pages, and I have a lot to stay. Sorry for the long review.

I loved this book before, and all over again, although not without qualifications. It took me nearly two weeks to read these ~1,200 pages, but only because I was reading other books at the same time (and teaching three classes) – it was really a handful of nights reading 300+ pages at a go. I loved this book all over again.

The very obvious impetus was the current pandemic, and my curiosity about how well The Stand tells a story that we are now (in some ways) living. The answer is, pretty well, actually. In the real world we don’t have a supernatural evil force in the form of a shapeshifting man with a cadre of more and less intelligent evil-minded followers; but there is plenty of metaphorical material there for those so inclined. I’ll leave that work to each of you. The superflu aka Captain Trip’s infection itself is different from Covid most importantly in the speed and rate of transmission, the death rate, and the speed with which it does its deadly work. It is infectious massively more of the time, and nearly always deadly. Covid is wildly infectious and pretty deadly by real-world standards; Captain Trip’s takes this to a logical extreme, which is often what fiction does, but the parallel is striking and instructive. That it is also wildly fast-acting is an interesting point. In some ways, the slowness with which Covid makes itself known (meaning, we can be infected for days or weeks before we get sick – and we can be infected and not get sick, therefore acting as invisible vectors)… has helped its spread, because we humans have a hard time taking seriously something that we can’t immediately see happening. Captain Trip’s, on the other hand, looks more like this: guy coughs near you; 20 minutes later, you are coughing. You might both be dead in a day or two. This is much easier for people to grasp as a concept; they feel fear and wish to take precautions much more, and much sooner, than we have with Covid. The flip side is that it’s much harder to fight against (especially because if you cough, you die). At least to this lay reader, this difference between reality and fiction feels like a simple difference between two types of virus. To my (again, layperson’s) knowledge, a virus could act as quickly at this one does; we just didn’t happen to get one of those. There would be pros and cons.

Captain Trip’s was also manufactured in a lab as a form of biological warfare which then accidentally escaped. This is not the case with Covid.

Because of the massive death rate of Captain Trip’s, the post-pandemic world looks very different than the one we will be living in the real world. Roughly, let’s flip the numbers of living and dead: the United States in The Stand is populated by some tens of thousands of people. That means their challenges in rebuilding, and in thinking about designing a new world, are very different from the ones we’ll face. Well, I’m trying to write a book review and not entirely a social commentary; but let me say briefly, I think the Covid crisis is highlighting the inequities and injustices we’ve always lived under, and we have a rather special opportunity to do something to fix our systems, with this new (to many of us) vision we’ve been granted. The survivors in this novel, on the other hand, have been left with the “toys” (Glen Bateman’s term) of a previous world, but limited knowledge of how to use them, and the power (etc.) has been turned off. Ideally, they’ll choose what to pick back up (book learnin’, heat in the winter, animal husbandry) and what to leave lying (nuclear weapons). But Glen Bateman is not terribly optimistic. (I must confess, neither am I.)

On to the book review proper. This remains a thoroughly compelling, expertly paced, engrossing story. Characters are delightfully wrought, various and complicated. The sympathy drawn out of us for the Harold Lauders of the world is disturbing as hell; he’s a villain but he’s very human. (The Walkin’ Dude is just evil, and not human.) While there are “types” in Glen Bateman, Larry Underwood, and Stu Redman, they’re convincing human beings at the same time that they’re types. Let’s face it, there are types in the real world, too; that’s where they come from. The momentum with which this plot moves could perhaps not be better executed; Stephen King is a master, and as I said above, I can easily take in 300+ pages in a single sitting (and stay up until 3am, I’m sorry to say), because it’s just all so juicy and absorbing.

That said, I did have a few concerns on this reread that I didn’t have just three years ago. Partly I suspect this is because in reading a print copy, I was able to pay closer attention to certain details. The audio experience I had in 2017 was entertaining, and I certainly followed the story and many of its finer points, but I do feel like I can watch a story more closely when I read it. I can speed up and slow down at my own pace, reread a line if necessary. And I think seeing a word printed imprints it on my mind more thoroughly than a word heard. I don’t know if that’s because I have a certain kind of brain or if it’s relatively universal.

On the other hand, I also think I’ve become more attuned to certain issues and injustices in the world in the last few years. So, on this go-round I noticed a problem in particular with race and ethnicity. King’s characters are almost all white, which doesn’t seem statistically plausible in this country, although I’ll allow that in 1978 (when this novel was originally published) the country probably looked a lot whiter than it looks now – it probably was a little whiter, but it also would have looked a lot whiter, in terms of where society (and therefore Stephen King) directed its gaze. And the few characters of color? Well, we have the “magical Negro” trope, which Stephen King gravitates toward in many of his works. (There’s a decent write-up of the concept in King’s work available here thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.) “Although from a certain perspective the character may seem to be showing blacks in a positive light, the character is still ultimately subordinate to whites. He or she is also regarded as an exception” (source). Mother Abigail is delightful, and she does get her own backstory, but her function in terms of plot seems to fit squarely into “magical Negro” territory. It could be said she also serves as a token. Headline: Black woman character as hero! There are very few other non-white characters, and they’re all problematic: the abominable Rat Man, the heroin addict in the “second epidemic” section, the “black junta” early in the pandemic (they wear loincloths. This is disgusting, SK). But the ending really got me, and take note, writers of all stripes: the end of your book is the taste that is left in your reader’s mouth. At the end of The Stand we get the evil force sometimes known as Randall Flagg reawakening in an unknown place where he is surrounded by brown-skinned men with spears who don’t speak English but worship him. Not cool.

King’s women are sort of up-and-down with me; I rather love Frannie Goldsmith, the pregnant college student who is part scatter-brained and part moral compass, but I’m also getting weary of the pert young thing who lusts after the middle-aged man. And Tom Cullen, the mentally challenged man with occasional rare wisdom who is able to tune into a higher frequency than his peers-of-normal-intelligence – well, he feels a little like the mentally challenged version of the “magical Negro.”

These concerns dismayed me on my second reading, and while I want to be clear that I really enjoyed rereading this book and still find it to be a masterpiece, it is a flawed masterpiece. And I wonder what King would see fit to correct, if he were to edit this novel for a reprint in 2020. He’s still problematic now, as we know, but I think we should ask of our heroes (literary and otherwise) not that they be perfect, but that they be always learning, progressing, and always willing to learn. I’m certainly still learning: for example, it took a second reading for me to track some of the concerning elements of this book.

I still recommend The Stand. In some aspects it nears perfection. In others, cause for concern and fodder for discussion.

I am letting my original rating stand (ha), because I have new observations in both the positive and the negative columns.

Rating: 8 chocolate Payday bars.

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did not finish: Not a Gentleman’s Work: The Untold Story of a Gruesome Murder at Sea and the Long Road to Truth by Gerard Koeppel

Posted on May 1, 2020 by pagesofjulia

I quit just over halfway through this work of history/investigative writing/true crime. In 1896, a small sailing ship left Boston headed for Argentina with a cargo of lumber. There were twelve people aboard: the captain and his wife, a paying passenger, and a small crew. Within the first week, three of the twelve had been hacked to death with an axe. One of the crew was convicted and served time and was later pardoned. Koeppel leans heavily toward the paying passenger as the true murderer: a silver-spoon Harvard dropout and drunk with some odd behaviors. But in the end, the ‘long road to truth’ remains unfinished; we don’t know what really happened on board the Herbert Fuller.

It sounded up my alley, but this slim history threw me in a couple of ways. Koeppel’s tone varies from the meticulously detailed chronology to the sensationalist crowing of what can only have been. Here is neither Erik Larson’s novelistic telling of well-documented histories, nor the measured and transparent speculations of literary writers like Kushner, Kupperman, Monroe, and Wood.

Koeppel’s standard of proof is not my own. For my money, he puts rather too much faith in the eyewitness accounts of discombobulated sailors, chicken-scratched down by their fellows, none of whom spoke English as a first language, and now viewed at a distance of more than a century. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously inaccurate in any case. To point to inconsistencies in records such as these and claim them as proof of dishonesty seems unreasonable. I was bemused by a preoccupation with who had children and whether they in turn had children: the continuing line of the key players seems important to Koeppel in a way I don’t comprehend.

As usual, your mileage may vary, but this is not for me.

No rating.

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Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland (audio)

Posted on April 29, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Hello, yes, it’s Wednesday! With school just about done, I’m returning to book reviews as a more-or-less full-time venture, and social distancing is still in full effect, so it seems I’ll be producing plenty of blog content for the summer and we’re going back to a three-day-a-week schedule. Thanks for tuning in.

I have loved Susan Vreeland’s ekphrastic fiction for years now. In spirit of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring or Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue, this 2007 novel fictionalizes the story of the real-life painting Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

It opens with Renoir riding his three-wheeled steam-cycle to a village on the Seine outside of Paris to paint. We immediately meet several of the characters who will become models for his ground-breaking painting; and it does revolve around characters. While this is in part the story of the painting itself coming into being, issues of composition and light and technique, it is most about people. Renoir chases women; he is obsessed with beauty and must “love” (read: make love to) all his female models. He is also committed to “the impressionists” as a group and a movement. After reading Émile Zola’s indictment of the impressionists, that they “are inferior to what they undertake. The man of genius has not yet arisen,” Renoir knows he must get ambitious. He plans an enormous painting that will be landscape, figure painting, study of light and personality all in one. This novel follows him from discontent and conception through to the end of the painting, plus a years-later epilogue-style reflection.

But again: people. Renoir selects his models carefully, and then navigates their comings and goings; several bow out and new ones must join; he agonizes over the problem of having 13 around a dinner table (an unacceptable reference to the Last Supper), and must make a number of replacements. (Vreeland’s Author’s Note explains that all the models in her novel are the true and established models of Renoir’s painting, with the exception of the 14th, a brief glimpse of a man whose identity is unknown.) These changes in lineup, as well as the luncheons where the modeling and painting actually takes place, are the drama and plot of the novel. Over eight Sundays (the limited span of painting opportunity, because of seasonally changing light), the party meets to flirt and drink and joke and laugh and love. They take boating trips, of course, and several boat races close out the season. Part of the overall feel of the novel is this laughter, love, and conviviality. Partly too it is stressful and sad, but Renoir is always chasing joy.

Most of the story is told from a limited-third-person perspective that follows Renoir, but a handful of chapters track a few of the models. I think these might have been my favorites, actually: Renoir is engaging, and it makes sense that he forms the heart of this story in some sense, but he can be a bit exasperating (especially in his womanizing), and I loved getting to know some of his models a little better. The chapter that followed Angèle might have been my favorite departure from Renoir’s self-absorption. He is an engaging character in his own right, but not always very likeable.

The general feeling is indeed one of the appreciation of beauty, joy, and living in the moment, which (at least as portrayed here) are pillars of Renoir’s own worldview. I enjoyed being immersed in such appreciations, and in the love of lines, colors, light, and brushwork. I genuinely liked almost every character we met, and it felt like escaping into something lovely to rejoin this audiobook. (As I’m saying about everything I read and take in these days, I can’t separate the experience of this book from the pandemic. This one took me longer than usual because I usually listen to audiobooks in the gym and while driving, and midway through this book I lost access to the gym and had nowhere to go. It was a delicious escape, though, when I did get into it.) There was also an elegiac tone to things, especially late, and especially in the character of Alphonsine, who closes things out for us. She’s a somewhat tragic figure who I would happily spend more time with. In fact, I loved the women of this story most of all. I think Vreeland does women beautifully, especially in my favorites of hers, The Forest Lover and Clara and Mr. Tiffany.

Karen White’s reading of the audiobook feels right to me, and I greatly appreciate having all that French spoken aloud for me; it is a language I find confounding, and I can’t imagine how I would have heard all the names and vocabulary in my head if I’d read it off the page myself. I’m so glad I found this book in this format. I learned some things about art, about impressionism, and about period France; in the author’s note, Vreeland notes where she stuck to the historical record and where she diverged, and I feel pretty good about historical accuracy here. (Divergences were minor enough, and my retention vague enough, that I don’t think I’m leaving with any meaningful misinformation.) I’m still a fan of this author, who, incidentally, I just learned died in 2017. Luckily there are still a number of her novels that I haven’t yet read; I will look forward to those.

Lovers of historical fiction, art and ekphrasis, human dramas, and beauty for its own sake should take note.

Rating: 8 canotiers.

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Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can’t Be Tamed by Lane Greene

Posted on April 24, 2020 by pagesofjulia

It’s not really true that if you boil a frog slowly it won’t notice and will never try to escape. But if a lot of speakers very gradually inch a vowel forward or back, up or down in the space in the mouth, without even knowing, then over time a major change can set in without anyone acting in time to stop it. That is because vowel-boiling, unlike frog-boiling, is painless and victimless.

Another winner from Liz! I loved this book. It has just the right mix of expert, researched history and linguistics information, and irreverent, populist sense of fun and utility. In fact, utility is part of the central lesson of this book. Using English should be about effective communication; one can be correct, eloquent, elegant, without being snooty about it; correctness is relative and subject to context; the language is tough and durable, and doesn’t fall apart just because we slip up on the distinction between ‘who’ and ‘whom.’ (‘Whom’ plays a large-ish role in the book, to great effect.)

Lane Greene is an editor, a linguist, and a columnist on language. He’s originally from Atlanta, Georgia, but now lives in England with his Danish wife, and speaks nine languages. He has a deeply impressive grasp of the history and trends of the English language and of linguistics; he is an expert in these areas and easily wins my trust. And it’s refreshing to meet an expert who is not purist or snobbish about his field – although as Greene points out, the more expert the linguist, the less purist they’ll be.

He begins with the basics: the difference between prescriptivist and descriptivist linguistics. Descriptivism observes how language is used and has been used, and makes recommendations for how we use language based on how it’s been and is being used. Prescriptivism tries to make rules based on some sense of what is correct – it tries to prescribe, rather than observe. Prescriptivists believe there is what Greene calls One Right Way to do things, which is an inherently problematic concept. Greene knows how to set and follow rules; in one of his roles, he works as an editor, so he knows about the application of standards. (Particularly for a certain publication, for example, a “house style” sets rules.) But he is at heart a descriptivist. “To sum up: language is not so much logical as it is useful. It is not composed; it is improvised. It is not well behaved; it is resourceful. It is not delicate; it is hardy. It is not always efficient, buts redundancy makes it robust. It is not threatened; it is self-renewing. It is not perfect. But it is amazing.”

The book-length metaphor at work here is evident in the title. Language is wild, not to be tamed, and doesn’t take to prescriptivism’s puritanical tendencies. It is always changing, and it takes care of itself; it doesn’t actually need guarding or protecting. Greene proves this via a number of case studies and fascinating histories, including the Great Vowel Shift and shifts in the meanings of individual words: “In the Middle English era, manners dictated that a girl was expected to be silly and buxom, but never nice” (because each of those words meant something very different then than they do now). He relates humanity’s adventures in language, including the design of purely logical languages (never caught on) and attempts to teach computers natural language, which doesn’t work because “the rules are too many, the exceptions too manifold.” He studies language as a political tool (less powerful than some think).

And in my favorite chapter (six), “Whom in a biker bar,” he handles questions about register and the limited necessity for ‘proper’ English. “The choice of [register] allows a speaker or writer a valuable second channel of communication, alongside the literal meaning of the words and grammar that (hopefully) add up to a clear proposition, command, question or request. … To restrict yourself only to Formal – to buy into the One Right Way fallacy – is to leave a valuable and versatile tool lying on the ground.” I had been wondering, throughout this spirited and convincing defense of descriptivism over prescriptivism, why indeed I am teaching my students to avoid comma splices (etc.), and chapter six answered it for me. There is still a utility for a ‘proper’ English in certain settings, but the grammar police of the world (and those whom Greene calls ‘language tamers’) take undue pleasure in correcting us when in fact we could stand to relax in most settings – especially in spoken language. “Insisting that speech – a live activity, always changing, a biological behavior – must imitate writing – which is fixed – is a bit like insisting that people should continue to look like an old photo of themselves.”

This book is a joy for anyone who loves language, its niceties and nuances and finer points, its ever-changing, exciting, shape-shifting utility and its fascinating history. It’s certainly for anyone who is still hung up on correcting other people’s grammar, and it is certainly for anyone (like an editor or an English teacher) whose job it is to do so. If you’re unconvinced that prescriptivism doesn’t serve us, please read this book. If you love words, read Lane Greene. I think I know of some students who will be assigned excerpts this coming fall semester!

Rating: 9 prepositions at the ends of sentences.

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Dog Years by Mark Doty

Posted on April 3, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Love for a wordless creatures, once it takes hold, is an enchantment… This is why I shouldn’t be writing anything to do with the two dogs who have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter?

How indeed?

I love Doty, as you know, and this book is an excellent example of some of the qualities of his work that I love best. He is thoughtful, meandering, wise, self-deprecating, shows his thinking transparently on the page, and has the most precise and loving eye for beauty; he turns most every observation of the world into ekphrasis somehow, by which I mean that he turns the same active, joyful, inquisitive observation to the Massachusetts shoreline or a NYC sidewalk that he turns to a museum-quality painting.

This review is a trigger warning of sorts. I love Doty, and I love this book, and I’m glad I read it, but it was also painful as hell. Dog Years is about beloved pet dogs who die (as they do), and it’s about 9/11, and it’s about death and loss. It is also absolutely relevant that I read this during the pandemic of the spring of 2020, and everything feels a bit more raw these days, the angst a bit closer to the surface than usual; and I have in no way recovered from my dear Ritchey dying more than a year and a half ago now, and my dear Hops is not even 12 yet but he shows his age. This book was beautiful and transcendent and really hard on me. I mean it as a compliment – this book comes with a warning because it’s so well done.

Because, you know, a book about a beloved pet dog dying could easily be (and they usually are) insipid, overly sentimental, a cheap shot. And I think telling the story of 9/11 (or Katrina, I think about that one a lot too) is awfully hard to do in a way that’s not going to sound like anybody could have told it. (This is true of the pandemic of 2020, too. Who will tell that story well? Will it be Doty? I’d buy that book. See also Paul Lisicky’s excellent recent release, Later. A little awkward: Paul Lisicky appears in Dog Years as Doty’s husband, which is no longer the case.) In other words, Doty has undertaken an ambitious book, which aims to do a couple of things at once that look nearly impossible to do well, even individually. But of course he’s knocked it out of the park. (It is a sign of my faith in him that I undertook to read a book about dogs dying. Whew.)

The dogs in question are Arden, a black long-haired retriever, and Beau, a golden retriever(ish). They are very specific beasts, individuals, as dogs are. Arden belonged to Mark Doty and his partner, Wally, in Provincetown, Mass., where Wally sickened and eventually died of AIDS, but not before Mark brought home Beau to join the family as well. “My friends think I’ve lost my mind: You’re taking care of a man who can’t get out of bed and you’re adopting a golden retriever? They do have a point, but there’s a certain dimension of experience at which the addition of any other potential stress simply doesn’t matter anymore.” (That is a golden retriever puppy, I would add.) Widowed, Mark (and Arden and Beau) will eventually form a new family with Paul, and it is in this shape that they make their way to the end of both dogs’ lives, eventually, after much travel and moving around – including living in New York City in September of 2011… I have seen Doty handle grief and loss before (although I’ve not yet read Heaven’s Coast, so there is still that), most recently of course with What Is the Grass, where death forms one of the five sources of Whitman’s genius. And Doty’s, I’d say. The way that these strands are intertwined is lovely and perfect.

When the towers fall, the enormity of all that loss and death and threat to the world is too much to conceive. “With the world in such a state, isn’t it arrogance or blind self-absorption to write about your dogs?” But Doty knows that “we use the singular to approach the numberless,” and this echoes one of the lines I most obsess over in Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, about “the strangeness and singularity of things…” (There is again an echo of the thread in Still Life that is about reflection, in all its senses: “We know ourselves by how we’re known, our measure taken by the gaze of the outsider looking in.”) The singular losses of Arden and Beau offer Doty a way to write about 9/11 and about topics larger than them. The unique to communicate the universal, and the personal to illuminate the public.

For me, what is perhaps the crux of this book came early. “To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish–does that make one wise, or make one a fool?” This is a more personal review than usual, but here we are. This is something I’ve been wrestling with, the enormity of loving again after the pain of loss, and I can’t quite believe that either way, the yes or the no, is the right thing. But I always feel I’m in good hands with this writer. Maybe I’ll figure something out if I keep reading.

Of course you known as well that I love Doty’s detailed lists of things, his descriptions (ahem) and the simple fact of his attention turned to all the humble things… the soup Arden smells on that sidewalk. “Of Franco’s retail experiment, there remained for several years an odd little lamp beside his old shop door marked with a thirtiesish design that would have held no meaning if you didn’t know what it had illuminated–but now that’s gone, too.” Things and meaning and the spaces they held, left behind.

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention structure, which absolutely needs mentioning here. Longer, numbered (untitled) chapters do the work of memoir, of memory, not entirely chronological but at least following life in some form; some of them take the form more of essay than of strict narrative, like in chapter three, when he lists and details seven “aspects to our delight” in dogs. Between these are spliced shorter pieces headed Entr’acte (an interval between two acts of a play or opera; a piece of music or a dance performed during an entr’acte), titled and not numbered. These generally take the present tense, and range as widely in content and theme as the rest of the book… and wouldn’t you know, my MFA thesis took the same structure, longer memoiristic essays with short lyric pieces in between… There is also a good bit of Emily Dickinson in this book, and I think my new approach to poetry is just to let Mark Doty tell me about it.

This is a writer I return to for guidance, and this book is an exemplar of what I appreciate about him, but (if you love a dog) it may hurt you, too.

Rambling review brought to you by the pandemic and my difficulty focusing, and the pain that this beautiful book brought me.

Rating: 9 obstreperous things.

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What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life by Mark Doty

Posted on March 30, 2020 by pagesofjulia

What Is the Grass is literary criticism and explication, memoir and meditation, and the kind of fine, evocative, thoughtful prose that Mark Doty does best.


It was part of Walt Whitman’s extraordinary innovation with Leaves of Grass to close time and space, to bring his observations and a sense of intimacy to each reader who finds him. It feels perfectly natural that acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty (Dog Years; Still Life with Oysters and Lemon; Deep Lane) chooses to receive, interpret and muse upon these transmissions with What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.

Doty, like Whitman, is gifted with words, a lover of beauty and of men, a New Yorker. He feels haunted by the elder poet, sees and smells him in the museum of Whitman’s home, again encounters his ghost “above the shoulders of a bedmate on a winter afternoon early in the twenty-first century, in an apartment tower in Hell’s Kitchen.” What Is the Grass is a close reading of Whitman’s great work, but also of American poetry, same-sex love, the exuberance of the physical body, myriad cultural shifts and Doty’s own life.

As is his habit, Doty’s mind on the page wanders widely. Considering a “weird period piece of art porn,” he realizes that “even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death.” Indeed, death is the fifth of five sources Doty identifies for Whitman’s genius, by which he organizes this book. First, “an experience… of transforming character, loosening the doors from their jambs,” some life-changing moment or moments in Whitman’s life. The second source, “The Unwriteable,” is vigorously, jubilantly celebrated queer sexuality; here and throughout, Doty considers his loves and lovers, relationships and travels.

Next the very city, the “great stream and pulse of life” that is Manhattan, and then language itself, the lovely trips and surprises and sensuous effects and all the multitudinous details to be found in the Crystal Palace exhibition, “at which examples of practically everything human endeavor had created up to 1853 were on display.” Add to this slang and regionalisms, and “these words splash onto the page in Whitman’s first edition, as if a dam holding back a flood of new speech had been dynamited, all at once, by the force of a single poem.”

The fifth source of Whitmanian genius is death, “that strong and delicious word,” which Doty as well must wrestle with. “I’ve seen a man I loved die, and it seemed to me a pure liberation.” But “time avails not, distance avails not,” as Whitman and Doty each repeat, and the latter helps navigate the former. Readers should be prepared to dig out a copy of Leaves of Grass (or find one: “there is a copy of the Leaves in every used bookstore, everywhere in the nation, count on it”) upon reading this book, which makes an indispensable companion and guide. Arriving finally at “the poet’s greatest glory, and the exegete’s inescapable defeat,” in the end, Doty reminds us that Whitman’s “words accomplish what words cannot,” and exits quietly.

This review originally ran in the March 20, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 lines I’d consider tattooing on my body.

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Sin Eater by Megan Campisi

Posted on March 27, 2020 by pagesofjulia

In this enchanting alternate history, a Sin Eater consumes the misdeeds of others, and may have a chance to right some wrongs.

Megan Campisi’s Sin Eater opens with a 14-year-old girl named May being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, in an alternate version of Elizabethan England. The royal family of Angland is entangled in court intrigue and murders, including of babes, to secure favored heirs to the throne, even considering marriage to the hated Northern lords. Common people work hard for a meager living; some starve unless given special permission from the queen to beg in the street. The penalties for petty crimes are high: vagrants have a hole “burned through the gristle of [the] ear with a hot iron as thick as a man’s thumb.” The penalty for a second offense is death.

In this cruel world, below even dung men and woad dyers in the social order, lies a cursed role: that of the Sin Eater. “It’s always women who eat sins, since it was Eve who first ate a sin: the Forbidden Fruit.” Marked by the iron collar locked around her neck and her tattooed tongue, she may be neither seen nor heard. She is called to deathbeds to hear the Recitation, a confession of sins; she translates these sins into foods, which the family will prepare for the Eating. By taking the sins of others into herself, the Sin Eater absolves the deceased. Every child in the street knows the basics. “Salt for pride. Mustard seed for lies. Barley for curses.” When a deer’s heart appears on a noblewoman’s coffin, the city’s older Sin Eater will not eat it, for the terrible sin it refers to was never confessed. She is tortured and killed, leaving May on her own to wrestle with a deadly royal plot.

Recently orphaned and terribly talkative, May is now forbidden to speak. Her apprenticeship as Sin Eater was both silent and short; she’s still learning which foods match the more esoteric crimes. In her favor, May discovers the strange power of the Sin Eater: afraid to touch her, people move out of her way, granting her access to prison cells and royal bedchambers. Chance introduces her to a group of fellow misfits, including a disfigured man, a leper and a roguish theater player. But she must solve the royal mystery alone and, just maybe, create a new fate for herself.

Sin Eater is a fully fleshed work of speculative fiction, abundant with the fine details of Elizabethan life and, of course, food. May is a damaged and sympathetic heroine, at once intelligent and innocent. This is an opulently imagined debut, horrific and weirdly beautiful, filled with earnest feeling as well as cruelty. Set aside time to read this engrossing novel in one go.

This review originally ran in the March 16, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 small loaves of bread.

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Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete by William C. Rhoden

Posted on March 20, 2020 by pagesofjulia

I had my composition students read this excellent article by Jemele Hill at The Atlantic, as we discussed issues in higher education and the rhetorical tools that make for good argument. I felt the memorable book title mentioned, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, rang a bell. I was motivated enough to go looking for a copy; I ended up getting it through interlibrary loan (ILL) at the college library, which fit neatly into our library instruction period – I got to show the students how to make the request, and I brought it to class when it arrived, so we could see how far it had traveled (just down the highway from Morgantown’s West Virginia University) and how long I’d get to keep it (sixteen weeks!). After all that, I was interested enough to read it, too.

William C. Rhoden’s deliberately provocative title comes from a racist comment made by a white fan at a Lakers game, and refers to the problematic relationship between Black labor and white profits. There’s a paradox at work here: the highest-paid Black athletes in professional sports pull truly unimaginable sums of money, but they still lack power over their own circumstances in some vital ways, and the owners, coaches, and powers-that-be in sports are still overwhelming white. It might seem counterintuitive to call someone a ‘slave’ who makes tens of millions, but Rhoden has some strong arguments to make about power dynamics. His book is partly a history of Black American athletes since the beginning of commercial sports in this country, and even before that. It is also partly a call to action: Black athletes have contributed for too long to the enrichment of white authority figures.

Because I’ve been trying to teach my students the strategies of argument this semester, I thought of this book in those terms. Rhoden has a strong thesis; we know from the outset his position on the question of Black athletes in the contemporary American sports scene. He offers substantial and substantive evidence, throughout history and in examining several perspectives (athletes, agents, parents, coaches, owners). Some of my students balk at arguments that voice a strong opinion; they have gotten it into their heads somewhere that ‘neutrality’ is desirable, but I argue that neutrality is first of all dishonest, and secondly, how will you ever convince anyone of anything if you are afraid to take a stand? Yes, Rhoden’s stance is clear from the start. And it’s worth noting that, as his audience in this instance, I was prepared to follow him: I was predisposed in his favor. But I think I can still say that his evidence, and the means and organization of his audience, were well-designed.

I learned a lot of history from this book. Major Taylor I knew, of course, but I did not know Isaac Murphy (horse jockey), Moses Fleetwood Walker (baseball), or Jack Johnson (boxer from Galveston). I knew Jackie Robinson, but not Curt Flood or Rube Foster. Althea Gibson and Wilma Rudolf were vaguely familiar at best. A number of individual stories, these and many more, I found fascinating, so involving that I was in danger of heading down a rabbithole until Rhoden brought me back to the larger picture. Also, I learned in this book that the alley-oop originated not in basketball but in football!

Chapters are named for the dilemmas he identifies as running through history: the dilemma of illusion, the dilemma of physical bondage, of exclusion, of inclusion without power, of neutrality, of the double burden (being both Black and female), etc. He coins the term “Jockey Syndrome,” for what happens when those in power change the rules in order “to maintain control in the face of a perceived challenge to white supremacy.” As the term suggests, this began with horse racing. When I read about this concept, I immediately thought about the unspoken ‘rule’ and general resistance against the jump shot, early in basketball history, and the NBA’s official rule against the slam dunk in the 60s and 70s. (Tell me that wasn’t racist.) He comments meaningfully on the “Conveyor Belt” that carries young Black talent from lower-income or at-risk areas through college and into professional sports, all the while impressing upon them that they should feel grateful for the opportunity, and meanwhile capitalizing on their skills. He decries Michael Jordan’s neutrality on social and political issues – race issues – as a lost opportunity. “Black athletes like Jordan have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason.” He criticizes Bob Johnson, founder of BET (later owner of the Charlotte Bobcats), for using race and Black culture to make his billions but failing to deliver much in return.

At the center of the problem he identifies is the relationship of Black Americans to the larger American culture and socioeconomic systems in which they live. It’s vital that he takes this longer-term historical perspective, beginning with slavery and following through Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and whatever we’re going to call this present ugliness we’re living. Had the first Black owner of a major sports team come a generation earlier, Rhoden argues, the community would have celebrated; it would have meant the beginning of substantive change in power structures. But the success of integration, he writes, has led to the disintegration of Black communities and a certain sense of solidarity. What we have in place of a more segregated but more self-sufficient Black community is the Bob Johnson model. For example, the integration of Southern minor-league baseball meant the dissolution of the Negro Leagues. “A pattern was set: A black institution was dead, while a white institution grew richer and stronger. This was the end result of integration.” Johnson’s mentality, “of using backness as a way to get a piece of the pie without necessarily feeling any reciprocal responsibility to sustain black institutions… was the natural outcome of a half-finished mission.” That half-finished mission was integration, perfectly represented by highly-paid but powerless professional athletes. In other words, Rhoden’s argument about Black athletes is about something much larger than sports.

Rhoden has been a sports journalist since I was born, credited with elegantly handling the intersection of race, sports, and social history. This book was proposed in 1996 and published in 2006, and feels a bit dated already, in some of its details; but the essence of the problems he identifies has absolutely not changed. It’s an important argument; these are important conversations to have. Recommended.

Rating: 8 dollars.

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Maximum Shelf: Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

Posted on March 13, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on March 4, 2020.

Kawai Strong Washburn’s entrancing first novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, spans years and crosses over to the mainland and back again, following the Flores family–Malia and her husband, Augie; their sons, Dean and Nainoa; their daughter, Kaui–and the myths and gods of Hawai’i.

In Honoka’a in 1995, Malia remembers, “The kingdom of Hawai’i had long been broken–the hot rain forests and breathing green reefs crushed under the haole commerce of beach resorts, skyscrapers–and that was when the land had begun calling.” She addresses one of her children: “When I close my eyes we’re all still alive…” and she thinks back to the night “when your father and I were naked in his pickup truck, Waipi’o Valley, and we witnessed the night marchers.”

The night marchers are the first sign of magic in a story that plays with the concept throughout. What is magic and what is imagination; what is myth and what truth; which are the forces for good? Where does modern medicine meet the inexplicable, and what alchemy results?

When middle child Nainoa (“Noa”) is seven years old, he falls overboard in the waters off Kona and is surrounded by sharks. But instead of attacking, they carry him carefully back to the boat unharmed. This event is hailed as legend, a miracle, mark of the gods; in the years that follow, Noa’s strangeness will help to bring his family partly out of the economic depression brought on by the fall of the sugarcane industry, but his gifts are dubious and unreliable. His siblings have talents of their own to offer, but are alienated by the obvious specialness of Noa, the chosen one.

The novel’s perspective shifts, chapter by chapter, from Malia’s to each of her children; Augie’s voice will be heard only at the very end of this astonishing debut. Noa’s chapters are precise and observant, Kaui’s and Dean’s variously disgruntled and colorful and more vernacular, Malia’s reveal a close attention to larger meanings. Washburn’s prose style shifts with these voices, but throughout he showcases lush description and stark contrasts. In Kaui’s voice, “We set our toes and fingertips on razored bits of stone and slipped ourselves into the veined cracks of sheer walls of limestone or granite or basalt, all of it ceilinged by a thunder-brained sky.”

All three children travel to the mainland in search of education and opportunity. In Spokane, basketball star Dean has earned a full scholarship but grapples with the pressures of school and sport. In San Diego, Kaui discovers drugs and free climbing and falls in love with a woman who does not want what Kaui wants. After Stanford, Noa moves to Portland, where he saves lives as an EMT. He has a good partner and loves her daughter, but still struggles with his gift. Perhaps his lifesaving ability is not what it seems. Despite the family’s constant focus on Noa, the chapters that cover their separate lives offer refreshing views of Kaui and Dean, who are intriguing, flawed, engaging characters unto themselves. Their parents may center on Noa, but the novel resists doing so.

Amid various crises, each adult child will cycle back to the islands they call home. Noa, as always, leads the way, but Dean and Kaui have roles to fulfill within the family and on the islands, too. Their parents’ needs are both burden and gift. Malia continues to question the apparent favor bestowed upon her middle child: “If you were more of the gods than of us–if you were something new, if you were supposed to remake the islands, if you were all the old kings moving through the body of one small boy–then of course I could not be the one to guide you to your full potential. My time as a mother was the same as those last gasping breaths of the owl.” Each character is torn by the need to belong to a place and a people, the need to rescue and be rescued, to persist.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a gorgeous, rich, multifaceted novel. As it shifts between the mindsets of Malia and her three children, it poses questions behind their stories, interrogates joy and love and faith and loss, rage and redemption, the price and reward of returning home. This is a story about a small number of central characters and their often sad and painful daily lives, and also about more universal struggles. It’s about past, present and future Hawai’i, including the racial tensions between native Hawai’ians and the haoles that have changed their world so much. It’s about family, hope and risk.

Memorable characters, richly evoked settings, heartbreaking realism and alluring myth combine in a magical, expertly plotted, completely absorbing novel. Washburn takes his readers into a world that is both known and entirely new.

Rating: 8 owl feathers.

Come back Monday for my interview with Kawai.

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