Monday June 30th 2008, 10:21 pm
It must be enheartening to Open Letters readers: month after month, they’re served live ammunition! Every month, across a wide variety of subjects, they’re given long, involved, highly detailed (and, of course, highly readable) reviews that can then stand them in good stead later on, should they encounter less felicitous (and inevitably shorter) reviews of those same books elsewhere. Read a shoddy, lazy review of some noteworthy new release in, say, The New Republic or Harper’s? Wait for the Open Letters review to get the full story and some refreshingly reasoned discourse!
A variation on the phenomenon holds true even in literary publications that are top-notch. In such venues (The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the good folks over at Quarterly Conversation), where book reviews are given space and time to unfold and dig deep, Open Letters still comes in handy, as counter-ballast, as an expert second opinion.
Take the issue of the mighty TLS for 20 June 2008, for example: in no less than four separate places, that issue weighs in on titles already covered at Open Letters, and in each case, the contrasts are striking.
First is Lidija Haas’ delightful overview of several contemporary romance novels, “Vagaries of Love.” This piece is a bravura performance whose opening deserves to be quoted in full:
Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind - Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence - and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue - it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic book becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.
This is hilarious and entirely debatable stuff, and one of the books Haas uses in her piece is The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett, about which Haas writes:
Barrett’s novel is uneasy in tone; it cannot decide what it is aiming for, at some moments moodily imagining time “clotted like blood in a bowl”. at others uncomfortably entangled by the mechanics of the plot…
Back in November of 2007, stalwart Open Letters writer Karen Vanushka tackled Barrett’s novel (at considerably greater length than Haas’ broad survey piece would allow). Take a look to see how she found The Air We Breathe!
A few pages later in the TLS there’s Colin Shindler’s brief review of 1948 by Benny Morris - only what follows Shindler’s by-line isn’t really much of a review. Shindler has a bad case of reviewer-itis: he writes about what Morris writes about, but he virtually never writes about Morris’ writing. The most he risks doing, somewhat lamely, is to suggest that 1948 might have been a more complete book if Morris had had access to sealed Arabic sources. Since this would be true of any book on the subject (and since it’s the abiding pity of all sealed sources), it’s not a very helpful verdict.
Fortunately, in this very month, June of 2008, Open Letters‘ own Greg Waldmann also reviews Morris’ book, in minute detail and with lots of emotion broiling right there on the surface. It’s a good example of what Shindler shies away from doing.
Turn the page in the TLS and you encounter Peter Pesic’s review of Mark Penn’s Microtrends, in which he writes: “Penn’s book is a collection of seventy-five such microtrends, presented as brief “sound bites” which, despite attempts to make them lively, become tedious through accumulation.”
To learn the full, horrific extent of that tedium, look no further than October 2007 of Open Letters, where Penn’s book by turns baffles and outrages Nonfiction Editor Steve Donoghue.
And lastly there’s Saswato R. Das’ short review of George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiements, which he characterizes as “a very personal odyssey through the annals of science, touching on a few eclectic milestones.”
Once again, the June 2008 Open Letters issue will come in handy: the redoubtable Lianne Habinek gives Johnson’s book a long and thorough examination, one that will particularly satisfy TLS readers who came away from Das’ piece wanting more.
That more is what Open Letters strives to provide its readers each month. The thrill of being part of the same conversation as legendary publications like the TLS is a big part of the reward.
Sunday June 29th 2008, 9:47 am
Those of you who read the TLS with any regularity may have noticed a piece a couple of weeks ago by Professor Clifford Davies in which he asserts, with the satisfied solemnity of a cherry-bomb-hurler, that both historians and the hoi-poloi have been wrong for centuries, that there isn’t any such thing as the Tudors and there never was. In his commentary, “A Rose by Another Name,” Professor Davies maintains that nobody at the time - including the monarchs in question - thought of themselves as “Tudors,” or as living in the “Tudor era.”
I can hear your rumbles of confusion already! What about those historians, you’re asking? What about all the poets and playwrights and novelists and movie producers and TV researchers? What, indeed, about Open Letters’ monthly “A Year with the Tudors”? Has all of that been one protracted mistake, stalking some fraudulent ideological boojum? Can the magisterial pouting of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (from Showtime’s apparently calamitously named “The Tudors”) have been in vain?
Let’s all stay calm and listen to what Professor Davies has to say, shall we? Perhaps he and I might yet find a way to live with each other.
Item: Davies says that when young Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he “did so as the ‘Lancastrian’ claimant, tracing his descent, through his mother, from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (by way of his third wife), after the end of the main Lancastrian line with the deaths in 1471 of Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales.”
Well, yes and no. True, Henry made much of his Lancastrian claim to the throne, but he knew better than anybody how shaky that claim was. Yes, once John of Gaunt was able to marry his mistress Katherine Swynford, an act was passed legitimizing the children they’d already had (who’d been born bastards), but that same act explicitly barred their descendants from the succession. In offering to marry Elizabeth of York (Edward IV’s daughter), Henry was offering a union between York and Lancaster, knowing how fragile the texture of peace was after 150 years of internecine strife. It’s hard not to conclude that this union was to take the form of a new ruling house, neither York nor Lancaster. Hard, but Davies manages it.
Item: “Henry,” Davies writes, “did not use his patronymic.”
True enough, if you’re only thinking of London. In the north and west country, he used it quite a bit, and of course he used nothing else in Wales, his homeland. He imported the Welsh red dragon and other Welsh symbolism to his official heraldry, and these things became very visible decorative motifs throughout his reign. Davies says this is inconclusive, since such things were “Welsh” but not specifically “Tudor,” but for Heaven’s sake, what can this mean? Does Davies know of some other Welsh family wearing diadems and issuing edicts in 1490s England?
Item: Referring to the scandalous marriage of Queen Catherine to her steward Owen Tudor, Davies somewhat grudgingly writes, “To their credit, the ‘Tudor’ monarchs seem to have made no attempt to censor the account of their origins.”
The young people today refer to those as ’scare quotes’ - they’re meant to deny (or at least sneer at) the validity of whatever words they contain. The acid test I’ve developed for scare quotes is very simple: remove them, then see what happens to the thrust of the sentence. If, as in this case, nothing happens, then you have caught the author trying to eat his cake and have it too. If the Tudors were actually all just Lancastrians, then this is not an “account of their origins,” since those origins go back to poor old John of Gaunt. And if this is an account of their origins, then they - something - must have originated thereby. Owen Tudor’s seizing of (among other things, the randy dog) the main chance speaks volumes about his intent to create something of his own, something new.
Item: When Professor Davies begins sifting through the evidence, his account takes on its best, most engagingly donnish brio: “If one searches accounts of 1485, of 1509, of the succession crisis of 1553 (the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen), of the accessions of Mary and Elizabeth, even of accounts of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 - occasions on which any historian today could hardly but allude to ‘Tudor’ - the word and concept is conspicuously absent.”
“The only conclusion,” he concludes, “must be that the word was not in common use.”
This is fascinating stuff, and we must give credit for some points well-raised. The caution here comes from the conflation of “common use” with “common knowledge” (that allusion to “any historian today” is something to fear). History must of necessity give names to periods and movements that they might not have thought for themselves while they were unfolding. That doesn’t make those names wrong, even factually. Other than the man himself, no Roman in the first century b.c. thought of himself as living in the age of Julius Caesar. No citizen of the Byzantine Empire ever thought of himself as anything other than a Roman. Millions died of the Black Death without calling it that. Millions more were caught up in the Industrial Revolution without knowing the name it would later be called. The present uses these names because they accurately describe the finished reality of the past, not because those are the names the past itself used. Slapping ‘Lancastrian’ or even ‘psuedo-Lancastrian’ onto the brief line of rulers who sprang from Bosworth Field wouldn’t be accurate, despite how worked up Professor Davies gets on the point.
Item: And he does get worked up! He scolds: “Indeed, historians of the period seem incapable of mentioning kingship, monarchical government, or state without adding the epithet “Tudor” in a sort of reflex action; as if there was necessarily something both special and uniform about the period, ignoring the very different policies, attitudes, and approaches of the monarchs concerned.”
But, as I hope I’ve shown in the last seven months, those monarchs weren’t all that different, despite their very different actions. They had the same drive, the same fierce temper, the same enormous intellectual abilities, and something of the same charisma. Richard III had some of these qualities but by no means all; James I had none, alas. That bespeaks a discreet subset, whether Professor Davies likes it or not.
And he doesn’t like it, not one bit. He ends his jeremiad with a line that deserves to be quoted and discussed everywhere: “We must learn to do without the Tudors.”
Of course this will never be, as Professor Quixote seems to know perfectly well himself. Hundreds of years of usage makes a term impossibly entrenched - you could write a hundred such learned pieces as this one, and it wouldn’t change the central fact: the Tudors aren’t going anywhere.
Nor, in my humble dissent from Professor Davies, should they.
Friday June 27th 2008, 11:17 pm
The great American poet Frank O’Hara was born on this date in 1926, and although his first love was music, he gave to the world verses as funny and silky and wonderful as anything America had yet produced. Unlike many of the poets of the latter half of the 20th century, he wrote work that required no hipster decoder-ring to access and appreciate; he was the bard of the everyday, weaving an irrepressible twinkle into almost everything he wrote. This was true of the man as well as his verse - his legions of friends and lovers would attest to it: there never was a kinder heart, a more generous soul, or a more playful spirit than Frank O’Hara.
In 1966 he was struck by a jeep at the age of 40, and he died a day later. There will be no seminars on his problematic later work (as there always will be about his longer-lived exact contemporary, James Merrill) - instead, there’s only the one thick volume of his jaunty, knowing verses, standing as happy monuments to poetry’s power to move right to the essence of things. Many of you will know some of his poems already, perhaps because some passionate fan pressed them upon you (perhaps even because Open Letters’ Poetry Editor pressed them upon you - he gets around, after all, and like most poets, he loves O’Hara’s work!), but to mark the date one is offered here nonetheless: it’s one of his most-anthologized pieces, which just goes to show that even anthologists sometimes get it right:
A Step Away From Them
It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in the sawdust.
On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’s
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, e bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full of life as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Tuesday June 24th 2008, 10:43 pm
The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President
Edited by Jeffrey A. Engel
Princeton University Press, 2008
| From October 1974 to December 1975, George H.W. Bush was the head of the United States Liaison Office – the closest thing America had to an ambassador to China, since the two countries didn’t establish formal diplomatic relations until 1979 – in Beijing, and during that time he kept a private diary of this thoughts, activities, and impressions of an enigmatic country slowly emerging onto the world stage. Bush and his wife Barbara (and their dog, Fred) took the post to escape the post-Watergate darkness that had engulfed Washington and Bush’s political mentor, Richard Nixon, and what they found was an entirely different world from the one they’d known. |
|
 |
Bush never intended his diary to be published, and more: he never actually wrote it but rather dictated it. This makes the task editor Jeffrey Engel has accomplished all the more impressive, since, as he puts it, “verbal elegance is not his [Bush’s] strongest suit” (older readers will recall a character in a Doonesbury strip urging the then-President on: “come on, Mr. President! Wrestle that syntax to the ground!”).
From this material Engels has produced a startlingly important reassessment of the first President Bush (Engel’s 70-page concluding essay will stand as one of the strongest pieces of presidential analysis ever put on paper), but the present-day reader should be warned: you will weep openly while reading this book. Those of us who were often frustrated with the first President Bush, who considered him too goofy or amiable for his own good – a bit of a lightweight – have been shown, through eight long years of slope-browed, snickering evil just how much worse things could be. Here is G.H.W. Bush seeing vast Chinese growing-fields:
There are no tractors to be seen, and I have not seen a truck yet; but there is plenty of manual labor and plenty of action on the fields that are so green that your eyes ache almost.
And here is that brisk, optimistic near-incoherence some of us must now remember fondly:
It’s great. All’s well. End first night. No substance. Lots of new sights and sounds and smells. Don’t drink the water. The soap is good. The eggs are little. Shortwave makes a lot of whistling sounds – sounds just like 30 years ago. Lots to do. Lots to learn.
“Lots to learn” – and the hot tears prick again.
–Steve Donoghue
Sunday June 22nd 2008, 4:36 pm
They’re very rare, these particular contemporary American authors – like the mythical chimera, which with compromised appeals to three radically, even genetically different constituents, they have managed, against all odds, to win a place in the hearts of all three of Open Letters’ founding editors. They elude Sam Sacks’ dislike of cheap, easy prose; they elude John Cotter’s dislike of clumsy, inelegant phrasings; and they elude Steve Donoghue’s dislike of, well, everything. A small, select group of 20th century writers has managed to please all three of these exacting critics, and Open Letters pauses today to acknowledge the birth date of one such: the great novelist and critic Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle on this date in 1912.
She attended Vassar College and then later immortally vivisected it in her bestselling 1963 novel The Group. Her 1957 autobiography Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood was, to put it mildly, incendiary. Her 1971 novel Birds of America was as deeply subversive in its own subtle way as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would be three years later.
And she was equally famous in her own lifetime for her personal life. She married her second husband, renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson, in 1938, and in 1979 on The Dick Cavett Show, she famously said of Lillian Hellman “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’
Over the course of all these events, year after year, she turned out exactly the kind of sharp, witty, clear-eyed and unencumbered literary criticism to which Open Letters is devoted. In everything she wrote, she presaged Sam Sacks’ belief in the internal vitality of fiction:
I would say to the student of writing that outlines, patterns, arrangement of symbols may have a certain usefulness at the outset [of writing a novel] for some kinds of minds, but in the end they will have to be scrapped. If the story does not contradict the outline, overrun the pattern, break the symbols, like an insurrection against authority, it is surely a stillbirth. The natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind.
And she likewise held respect enough for the intersections of history to please even Steve Donoghue:
We not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do substantially believe it, as being continuous with real life, made of the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance – a guarantee of credibility. If we read a novel, say, about conditions in postwar Germany, we expect it to be an accurate report of conditions in postwar Germany; if we find out that it is not, the novel is discredited. This is not the case with a play or a poem. Dante can be wrong in The Divine Comedy; it does not matter, with Shakespeare, that Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer.
And as for John Cotter: look at the pure tensile economic beauty with which those lines are constructed.
She died in 1989, and virtually everything she wrote in her long productive life was equally beautifully done. Most writers make their mark in either fiction or criticism; she adorned both and shaped our minds in the process. Open Letters honors her birth date and salutes her memory.
Saturday June 21st 2008, 12:18 am
Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich, may have had a moment, reading Richard Evans’ review of his book in the current New York Review of Books, where his spirits lifted and he began to smile. After all, Evans begins his review by writing that Fritzsche “writes with his customary flair and verve, and packs an enormous amount into a relatively short volume.” Evans goes on to call the book “immensely readable and intelligent,” and Fritzsche might have felt pretty secure at that point.
Alas, such security proves to be as fleeting as that of 1938 Poland.
Evans invokes the “voluntarist return” school of Nazi historians that tends to minimize the complicity of the ordinary German on the street in the crimes of the ruling regime - invokes it only to damn it and Fritzsche just about as thoroughly as he’s likely to get damned in the popular press, for short-sightedness and a willful soft-pedaling of the facts. It’s a sobering sight:
Thus for example Fritzsche alludes, like other exponents of the “voluntarist return,” to the fact that only three thousand or so prisoners remained in concentration camps by the mid-1930s . But like them he fails to realize that a major reason for the low number was the fact that the task of repression had been taken over by the regular courts and judicial system, which had put more than 23,000 political prisoners behind bars in Germany’s state prisons and penitentiaries by this time.
Fritzsche can at least be grateful to our own Steve Donoghue, who in his much shorter review of Life and Death in the Third Reich stopped where Evans was only getting warmed up, with the generous praise of a powerful, intelligent work. It’s Fritzsche’s slight misfortune (it could have been worse, after all - they could have ignored him) that the NYRB chose to enlist the greatest living Nazi historian to examine his work; that’s an exam few indeed could pass unscathed.
Other highlights of this issue include a stimulating (though mostly wrong) essay by Christopher Benfey on the poetry of Herman Melville, another rock-solid entry from the always-trenchant American Revolution historian Edmund S. Morgan, and an amiable piece by John Updike on those two Boston painting prodigies, John Singleton Copley and Winslow Homer, to which only one or two small corrections might be added, foremost that when Copley painted Samuel Adams in 1772, he was hardly a “rising firebrand” anymore. Edmund White on Marguerite Duras is also a hoot, just about the most polite cheek-slap imaginable!
Thursday June 19th 2008, 7:16 pm
Pawprints of Katrina
by Cathy Scott
Howell Book House, 2008
| When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, dozens and dozens of city blocks became inundated swamplands of festering sludge, and thousands of people were displaced and evacuated, n most not knowing when – or even if – they’d ever be able to return. The haphazard squalor of their subsequent fates became the shame of a nation, but there were those who suffered even worse – the pets left behind in the drowned ruins of the city. |
|
 |
Cathy Scott was embedded with the Best Friends Animal Society, a group that ended up rescuing nearly half the estimated fifteen thousand stray or stranded animals scrounging and starving in the wake of the storm. In this meticulously-reported (albeit ploddingly written) account, she tells the stories of all the desperate animals, and all the heroic volunteers who boarded flatboats and searched through attics and garages to find them (the included photographs by Clay Myers, of formerly pampered cats and dogs reduced to haunted-eyed scavengers skulking in the wreckage, are indelibly wrenching).
These are stirring stories, and Scott tells them all – lacking a more poetic touch, this will certainly be the definitive account of Katrina animal rescue. Everything’s here: the owners cruel enough to leave chained and fenced dogs behind; the kittens and puppies born right as Katrina or Rita made landfall, the white-faced older animals who survived against all odds. And, happily, the beginnings of legislation to prevent such ancillary tragedies from happening again:
As a result [of the media attention given to abandoned pets], Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call with a resounding message: along with people, pets also need to be protected during a disaster. What came out of the televised images, as the world watched in horror, was the vow never to let it be repeated. Katrina proved that people need to be prepared, from individuals putting identifying tags on their pets’ collars or microchipping them to cat owners keeping crates on hand to government officials at all levels mandating provisions for not only humans but their pets.
The essential promise all good, conscientious animal owners make to their charges is rock-bottom simple: I will protect you from harm. If legislation arising from the tragedy of Katrina helps in the keeping of that promise, then some good will have come of those high waters.
–Steve Donoghue
Tuesday June 17th 2008, 9:41 am
Sun Going Down
by Jack Todd
A Touchstone Book (Simon & Schuster), 2008 |
|
 |
Jack Todd’s new book, a multi-generational novel about the Paint family’s involvement with the landscape and events of the American West from the Civil War to the Great Depression, could have been four times as long as its 363 pages, given the epic sweep of its subject matter. Unfortunately, it feels that long anyway, and the reader who manages to brave his way through to the end displays as much courage and fortitude as those early pioneers and settlers who tamed the West. Ebenezer Paint and his descendants are not the first of those pioneers, but they are hands-down the most boring.
The book is frenetically populated with colorful characters, and there is bound to be a little something for every potential reader (for instance, there’s a group of five sisters who’re something of a hoot, constantly out-doing the men around them in every way – they’ll certainly be the best part of the movie this book is preordained to become). Too little something to prevent eventual and certain starvation, but something. Sun Going Down gives every impression of being that one book all authors have, the one they dote over but which nevertheless refuses to cohere. Only somebody past-convinced of the worth of what he’s writing would unload prose like this:
They [Ebenezer and his new wife] fumed and feuded for a week. In the end, they seemed to wind down like spinning tops. Eb said he was married to the most bullheaded woman in the territory; Cora said there was never a man born so contrary or set in his ways. Finally the night came when Cora allowed him under her shift, letting him know that she was weary of their squabbling.
The narrative goes on and on like that (the letters the various characters write to each other are, if you can credit it, even worse), just a-wanderin’ and a-moseyin’ all over the place and even managing to make the Battle of Wounded Knee a bit tedious. The publisher’s ad campaign compares Sun Going Down to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. This was a singularly bad idea.
–Steve Donoghue
Sunday June 15th 2008, 11:35 am
It’s a classic good news/bad news scenario in The Sunday Times (with a patrician chaser). In the ‘good news’ column there’s Robert MacFarlane’s very satisfying review of Mohammed Hanif’s new book A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which MacFarlane calls “exuberant” and about which he writes: “Absurdity operates as a scalable quality in Hanif’s vision of the world: it is visible in tiny details and geopolitical shifts alike.” Open Letters’ own Steve Donoghue, writing in a much more abbreviated forum had similarly optimistic things to say about Hanif’s book.
Alas, the “bad news” side of the ledger is if anything more visible: an advertisement for Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees, now out in paperback. The ad takes up fully half of one page, and it contains blurb-snippets that bandy about words like “exquisite,” “elegant,” and even “brilliant.” Open Letters Poetry Editor John Cotter, writing back in July 2007, varies from these verdicts in some pretty decisive ways – be sure to click over to his review before succumbing to the lure of advertising!
And in The Sunday Times magazine, aged literary lion Gore Vidal kicks earnest interviewer Deborah Solomon in the teeth for twenty questions or so (she ends her abuse by saying “well, it was a great pleasure talking to you,” to which he responds, “I doubt that”), the first of which must surely catch the attention of any Open Letters reader:
At the age of 82, you will be publishing your new collection of essays this week, which seems likely to confirm your reputation as one of America’s last public intellectuals. Why do you think that critics have traditionally praised your essays more than your fiction, which includes “Burr,” “Myra Breckinridge,” and 20 other novels? That’s because they don’t know how to read. I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States.
To which Open Letters earnestly responds: Mr. Vidal, we exist! In the founding editors of Open Letters Monthly, you have at last espied your sought-after three first-rate literary critics in the United States! As reward for allowing you to rest at last from your quest, we’d appreciate a modest plug for the site and an invitation to share lunch with you some day, since all three of us are unabashed Vidal enthusiasts!
…
…
Saturday June 14th 2008, 12:41 am
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
by Mohammed Hanif
Knopf, 2008
 |
|
The author of this mordant and extremely smart debut novel is a graduate of the Pakistan Air Force who now works as a journalist, and from that unusual background has grown a book that is as wise as it is silly, whose grimness is always offset by gallows humor, and whose plot, not inconsequentially, will have you reading compulsively to the end.That plot concerns Pakistan Air Force Junior Officer Ali Shigri’s quixotic quest to understand his father’s suicide, a quest that leads him by labyrinthine paths into the acquaintance of an eccentric cast of misfits and eventually into the orbit of General Zia-ul-Haq, a deeply ambiguous figure and the novel’s best, most Falstaffian creation. |
Family and the bonds of friendship therefore form large parts of the book’s matter, but the true heart of A Case of Exploding Mangoes is wry and penetrating social commentary, always delivered with exquisite care (and quite often with the Bush administration’s misdeeds hovering in the background), as in Fort Commander Major Kiyani’s unwittingly damning military double-speak:
“Let’s say you caught somebody who wasn’t really a threat to national security. We are all human; we all make mistakes. Let’s say we got someone who we thought was going to blow up the Army House. Now, if after the interrogation it turns out that no, he really wasn’t going to do it, that we were wrong, what would you do? You would let him go, obviously. But in all honesty, would you call it a mistake? No. It’s risk elimination, one less bugger to worry about.”
My eyes keep glancing towards the prisoners, who are shuffling their feet and swaying like a Greek tragedy chorus that has forgotten its lines. Their shackles chime like the bells of cows returning home in the evening.
This book will engross you; it will make you sad; it will raise your frustration with the state of world affairs to a fever pitch; and all along the way, it will make you laugh. In other words, we have all heard from a new Joseph Heller, just when we need him most. Here’s hoping we hear from him again, and often.
–Steve Donoghue
|
|
|
|
