Teen Dream
Beach House
Sub Pop, 2010

Beach House’s self-titled 2006 debut sounded very much like two people making music in a room somewhere, and that’s exactly what it was – flubbed notes and all. The songs were spare and simple, but what was there was pure gold: basic drumbeats, fuzzy organs, old harpsichords, simple piano and guitar riffs, and, of course, Victoria Legrand’s mournful vocals. Gems like “Saltwater,” “Childhood,” and (above all) “Master of None” still frequent my playlist three years later. It was one of the most promising debuts of the decade.

Devotion, their second album, was a more proper and polished recording, but most of the edge and much of the personality were gone. Teen Dream is their latest and no doubt their worst effort, and fans of Beach House’s first album will no doubt wonder what the hell is going on. The singular tone of their early music has evaporated; the transformation that began with their second album is almost total. Chorale-like vocals and rough-hewn simplicity have made way for syrupy crooning and boring, over-produced melodies.

“10 Mile Stereo” sounds like a pale imitation of early U2. “Lover of Mine” is pretty much a late-seventies soft-rock ballad. “Zebra” starts the set with a dithering, generic guitar riff. Percussion shortly adds itself, then a breathy choir joins in, while Legrand’s increasingly rough voice – it sounds like she’s been smoking a lot in the last few years (another reason to quit, kids) – melodramatically rises and falls, spouting lyrical blandisms that recall Bono at his worst: “anyway you run, you run before us / black and white horse / arching among us.” The whole album trudges along like this – one sadly predictable moment after another.

So it’s back to the old songs for me. Here’s hoping this is the final hiccup before a return to form.

-Greg Waldmann

Not A Chimp: The Hunt
To Find The Genes That Make Us Human
By Jeremy Taylor
Oxford University Press, 2009

When Jeremy Taylor writes, in his terrific, rabble-rousing book Not a Chimp, that “we humans are an exceptional species,” he’s courting trouble from all comers, and you get the sense that he not only knows that but delights in it. Animal rights activists and many animal behaviorists will say he’s wrong: humans share, we’re so often told, 98% of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees, after all – surely the rest is window-dressing? Surely any attempt to reposition mankind at the unique and undisputed top of the evolutionary ladder is an attempt to sanction all the barbarities mankind has perpetrated on so-called “lesser” animals, most certainly including chimps, throughout history?

Taylor is having none of this. He makes the point – and follows it with a very detailed, very convincing layman’s tour of the neuroscience involved – that when it comes to evolution and life sciences, tiny percentage points can make gigantic differences. He urges his readers to move past a “chimp-ist” viewpoint in which taxonomical proximity to mankind lends chimps a brighter aura of sentience than, say, ravens or goats or elephants:

The important take-home point is that cognition is a tool to do an adaptive job, and when social and ecological problems are similar it can be expected to solve them in similar fashion, whatever the species. Claims for chimpanzee tool use, deception, manipulation of others, and insight can no longer reinforce claims for their evolutionary and genetic proximity to us, but only show that, like big-brained corvids, they have shared some of the same social and ecological problems as us. Any species that does so will evolve the necessary, and functionally analogous, cognitive structures to deal with them. The argument by analogy is undone.

Not a Chimp is a merry counter-blast to the animal rights and conservation activists who advocate, at least partly on the basis of genetics, extending human rights to mankind’s nearest cousins. The book’s flaw is tribal: Taylor stresses the cognitive differences between humans and chimps in order to pull back human-style civil rights, to stop the “lunacy” of extending those rights to chimpanzees. The fascinating science he’s synthesized and shared would work equally well if his ethics were more elastic – not fewer rights for chimps, but more rights for everybody, including, say, ravens, goats, and elephants.

–Tuc McFarland

The National Book Foundation held its annual award ceremony Wednesday night, and despite the presence of a rambling Gore Vidal, a schmoozing Dave Eggers, and an interloping James Franco, its hard not to feel let down by the whole gala. The reason for the disillusion is simple – the books that won seem dull and predictable, not the best books in their categories, but the ones most likely to receive committee approval.

In the awkwardly named “Young People’s Literature” category the award was given to Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin, about a courageous black teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. It may well be that this is a very good book, but, given its subject, the deep suspicion remains that it’s not the best book but the book adults think would be best for

“young people.” Keith Waldrop won the Poetry award for his collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, and maybe this book too is deserving, but maybe, you can’t help but wonder, Waldrop has just put in the most time in the close-knit world of poetry publishing and garnered slightly more name recognition than his competitors. T.J. Stiles takes the palm in Nonfiction for The First Tycoon: the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the skepticism continues to adhere. Maybe it’s excellent, or maybe Americans love to anoint one big fat mainstream biography of an American figure per year, tailor-made for Father’s Day and Christmas.

Parked hd

For me, such skepticism is originally fostered by the Fiction panel’s decision to reward Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin. I have read this book (I reviewed it in our September issue), and I can easily report that it’s nowhere near as good as the other nominees. It is, in fact, a bad book, breathlessly overwritten, manipulative, and thick with cheap ethnic stereotypes. But what’s perhaps most disappointing is that Let the Great World Spin is almost identical in its subject to last year’s PEN/Faulkner award winner, Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland. The enervating implication that readers take away is that if you write an angst-ridden, sentimental novel that makes constant, thinly-cloaked references to September 11, you are ipso facto writing great fiction. That, and the ancillary implication that the best books are the ones that the most people will approve of on paper.

–Sam Sacks

The Lost Origins of the Essay
John D’Agata, editor
Graywolf Press, 2009

Readers who remember John D’Agata’s first anthology, The Next American Essay, might cringe at the return of its Dave Eggers-style arrogance. “By ‘Next’ is meant those essays that will be inspired by these,” that collection declared. “By ‘American,’ of course, I mean not the nation. And by ‘Essay,’ I mean a verb.” And by “arrogant,” I mean a boy who sees fit to instruct his readers on the meanings of words in common usage, but The Next American Essay nevertheless was a superb anthology, leaping with life, full of lurid juxtapositions. So at the appearance of D’Agata’s follow-up volume, The Lost Origins of the Essay (again very handsomely produced by Graywolf Press), there’s dread mixed with anticipation.

The dread starts with the thing’s title. Who preens enough to use “lost origins” in an essay collection that features Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, and, God help us, Montaigne? Where’s the “lost” in that, considering the presence of such fixtures in every single essay anthology ever made? And the author isn’t helping things any, intoning about his title “Because I think having a broader sense of history can inspire a deeper sense of identity.” Yeesh. Granted, he’s not a boy anymore, but still – even old men don’t talk like that if they want to be taken seriously.

But once again, the ‘nevertheless’ follows right after – The Lost Origins of the Essay is a big, brilliant, absolutely invigorating anthology. Its net is cast much wider than in the first volume, for D’Agata’s conception here is that almost all narrative nonfiction that isn’t explicitly history comprises the “lost origins” (or, more properly, “long origins”) of the essay form we know today. So there are odd extracts from Sumer and Babylonia, as well as bits from Heraclitus, Theophrastus, Plutarch, and Seneca (the last three of which, we’re told, were translated by the editor). Africa is represented, as is China – and Japan, where the delightful Sei Shonagon (“she is gossipy, bitchy, snobby, fun,” D’Agata writes, “A complainer, a bragger, a tease, a sap”) gets her say. We come to Italy and approach the Renaissance and perhaps more well-trod ground; there’s Petrarch (also, we’re told, and perhaps we now blink in wonder, translated by the editor), a long rumination by Montaigne on Virgil, a refreshing inclusion of the great Thomas Browne, a travelogue by Basho, Swift’s oft-anthologized (but no less brilliant for it) “A Modest Proposal,” and 500 more pages of smartly chosen, wonderfully arranged stuff.

There’s plenty of experimentation here, a deep cosmopolitan breath of inclusion, and some winding-up remarks by John Berger, Lisa Robertson, and Samuel Beckett (whose “Afar a Bird,” we’re told – and by this point we’re either too skeptical or too tired to resist – is translated by the editor). The end result is much akin to The Next American Essay: sometimes infuriating, always thought-provoking, and ultimately very, very satisfying. Whatever John D’Agata’s other talents may be (raconteur, one fears, and polymath – and linguist! Let’s not forget that), he’s one hell of an editor.

–Liz Satterwaite

Francis Bacon, "Man with Dog"

From the backseat of my parents’ car, I listened and was afraid. Late autumn, deep dark—back then, in the mid-1980s, the roads weren’t so well lit. At the tail-end of a long family trip, warm and sleepy, it was easy for me—aged eleven or twelve—to slip into a very wild place, where the line between fun, boys’ adventure story and lost in the woods (something monstrous glimpsed up in the trees) was very thin indeed.

I listened to an episode of Nightfall, a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, originally aired in the early 80s (so, unlike Inner Sanctum or The Hall of Fantasy, both originally aired in the 40s, Nightfall was modern, with synthesized music and state-of-the-art studio production to prove it). The episode was “No Admittance/No Exit,” a story about an automated emergency clinic that determines treatment based on patients’ potential to contribute to society. Certainly, the story scared me (I’m easily scared), but it needn’t have for Nightfall to have kept me up that night, because the show’s opening had already done the trick.

That opening: A crash of notes high on a piano’s keyboard, like shattered glass, the sound of wind, and the host’s introduction: “In the dream you are falling, lost in the listening distance, as dark locks in…” a scream—a man falling—and then the host’s emphatic, “Nightfall.”

Maybe it sounds hokey to you youngsters, and maybe it is, but that intro was intoned by Henry Ramer, and he made it all sound so serious. Ramer was known to listeners of Nightfall as “your host.” He set up each episode, not in the cackling, punning style of The Crypt Keeper, who you know isn’t good for you, but like a gentleman—a gentleman with an upstairs torture chamber and a basement full of wicked science. “Good evening,” he said, not like Bela Lugosi (or someone impersonating Lugosi), but with a hint of vocal fry and an even sense of humor. Then, “tonight I would advice you to make certain that all of your escape routes are clear. The play is called, ‘No Admittance/No Exit’”—extra emphasis on “exit,” the emphasis one would place while pulling the mask off to reveal that he has no face!

Ramer provided the voice for numerous cartoon characters, including an invisible villain on a Canadian animated incarnation of Spider-Man, did voiceover work, commercials, and appeared in films, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

and Between Friends.

Yesterday, Neil Marsh wrote to tell me that Ramer died on November 12. (Marsh is the author of a website dedicated to the history of Nightfall, for which he contacted many of the cast and crew, including Ramer. Marsh and his research was invaluable when I wrote about the show for All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society.)

It’s as the host of Nightfall that I knew Ramer—his voice has long been a part of my peculiar internal landscape. I hear it often: when I re-listen to episodes of Nightfall, and when I hear certain words that Ramer said best.

–Adam Golaski

Samuel Johnson: A Life
David Nokes
Henry Holt, 2009

Samuel Johnson: A Biography
W. Jackson Bate
Reprinted by Counterpoint, 1998

In writing his fast-paced, engaging new biography of the great and terrible Doctor Johnson, David Nokes has three separate massive, uphill battles to fight. The first is with Johnson himself, who was vain enough to relish attention but cynical enough to savage biographers (and whose life absolutely refuses the neat arcs and resolutions the current book-buying public seems to demand). The second is with James Boswell’s mesmerizing, idiosyncratically epic Life. And the third is W. Jackson Bate’s monumental 1975 biography, rightly called the greatest modern life of Johnson.

Johnson is of course immortal, and thanks to Johnson Boswell is too, but a modern aspirant to the post of Johnson biographer might hope that time and advancing scholarship would remove Bate from contention. Fortunately, no: Counterpoint has kept his book in print in a very handy paperback, and so it pops up as persistently as old King Hamlet’s ghost, intoning ‘remember me’ to every new contestant.

And scholarship likes to think it’s more important than it really is; in simple truth, as a full-dress biography Bate’s book is unsurpassable. Johnson roars and rumbles through its pages as vividly now as he did when I first read the book forty years ago. Bate’s command of the innumerable pigeonholes of Jonnsoniana is absolute, and his prose scintillates (bless the folks at Counterpoint for keeping this feast before us). Nokes’ is quite the best book on Johnson to appear since Bate, and his book is leaner and quicker, often with sentences stitching together quotes from Johnson and others that run on for paragraphs at a time. Great care and discernment went into this production, but it can’t escape periodic duets with its looming predecessor.

Here’s Nokes about Johnson’s famous Dictionary:

Writing the Dictionary’s Preface he struck an elegiac note, remembering that both his wife Tetty and his former publisher and friend, Edward Cave, were now deceased. The work, he wrote, ‘was written’ (not compiled, but written) with little ‘assistance of the learned’ and with no ‘patronage of the great’, not in ‘the soft obscurities of retirement’ nor under ‘the shelter of academick bowers’ but amidst ‘inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’. The tone he struck was truculent. It was with ‘frigid tranquility’ that he affected to dismiss the Dictionary from him; but though this intensely personal statement goes beyond good taste, it makes one thing unmistakable. The Dictionary that he produced would be recognised as his.

And Bate, on the same work’s genesis:

The thought of creating an English dictionary that could stand comparison with these works [the standard Italian and French dictionaries of the previous century] had long depressed the spirits of any individual qualified even to begin on such a project. For of course it would have to be an individual. There was not only no academy in Great Britain similar to the French Academy but also, given the pride in British individualism, not much prospect of one.

Readers will decide for themselves (and on more evidence, obviously) which author they more fully trust, but the signal differences are on display even in excerpts: Bate is calm and summarizing where Nokes is urgent and intertextual. Bate tends toward a magisterial remove; Nokes takes us into the London streets and drawing-rooms, quoting Johnson & co. the whole time. Both do a superb job, although we’ll have to wait and see where Nokes’ book is in forty years. For the present, readers should rejoice at having both books at their disposal. Johnson would have fussed, but he’d have been pleased just the same.

– A.C. Childers

The Tyranny of Email:
The Four-Thousand Year Journey To Your Inbox

• Ali Baba Goes to Town full movie

John Freeman
Scribner, 2009

John Freeman’s slim, heartfelt screed The Tyranny of Email opens with a quote from Gandhi, a preposterous understatement, and an unsubstantiated statistic. This isn’t the best way to begin an attack on a daily mainstay of your readers’ lives.

The preposterous understatement comes after Freeman – the impossibly young new editor of Granta – lists some of the benefits of email:

Today we can type a note on our computer in New York and it will be received in New Zealand in nanoseconds. We use e-mail to send documents, music, wills, photographs, spreadsheets, and floor plans, communicate with our banks, send invitations. We no longer have to fill out those irritating forms to receive a return receipt by post, proof that our important letter arrived. The computer does it for us.

And then he somewhat grudgingly says, “some of this is a good thing.”

Some of it? All of the things Freeman lists are undoubtedly good things, and all of the things he doesn’t list would fill an entire book the size of this one. We use email to stay in touch with our friends and relatives, ask quick questions (for which we’d like quick answers) of colleagues, employers, employees, service companies, etc., make or confirm important appointments, check whether or not we have the right destination in mind before we go all the way over there, make and receive job offers, and a hundred other things that were far more time-consuming, cumbersome, and inexact before email. Then there’s the literary publishing world of which Freeman himself is a part: conferring with fellow editors, dealing with freelance submissions, working up documents for final revisions – is Freeman too young to remember what a logistical nightmare such things were when done via mail and carbon copies, or is Granta Charlie Chan in Egypt hd stodgy enough not to care?

The unsubstantiated statistic follows right after this: “Information overload is a $650 billion drag on the U.S. economy every year.”

Oh please. If anything at all were a “$650 billion” drag on the economy every year, that thing would be firebombed by Special Ops team by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, and that would be the end of that. Not only is no source given for this scarifying number, but no source could be given – what on Earth does “information overload” even mean? More importantly, where will you find three people who agree on what it means?

Freeman throws these things out there in advance of his main argument, which is that the burgeoning of email, “the techno-rave of send and receive” (as he more than once breathlessly refers to it), is deteriorating our interpersonal skills, eroding our free time, destroying our ability to be still, ruining our powers of concentration, and conspiring to murder President Lincoln. His book takes us on a fairly standard tour of the history of interpersonal communication, from stone tablets to postal service to telegrams. It’s done with more wit and prose-writing ability than what you’d find if you typed “correspondence” into Wikipedia, but there are no more facts and no better documentation.

It’s all foundation for his main point, delivered in the book’s concluding chapters, “Manifesto For A Slow Communication Movement” and “Don’t Send.” In these chapters, Freeman outlines his plan to fix all the information overload floating around these days, and it’s a plan that would win Nancy Reagan’s approval: it all boils down to abstinence.

He argues that email is killing us, and he’s not above a little speechifying to get his point across:

The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is working and what is not; and working at this pace, e-mailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and communities. We can change this; we have to change it. This book has been an attempt to step back from the frenzy and the flurry of the now – the now we have created and the now we have to slowly remove ourselves from – to make this argument. Of course e-mail is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

The natural response to all this — “By all means, you remove yourself from the ‘frenzy’ right away! Take as much time at your calligraphy as you need, and rejoin us when you’re rested” — is easy but not entirely cheap. Much of The Tyranny of Email could be summarized in an email: “Sorry. Having a bad day.” The problem here isn’t common sense, it’s common narcissism: instead of concluding that he’s bad at handling email, Freeman decides email is bad. It isn’t. It’s a miracle. It can be abused just like anything else, but if it’s eroding your personal time and destroying your ability to read, it’s because you’ve let it do those things. Freeman’s book has its share of flaws (Star Trek: The Next Generation is not, for instance, an “ongoing television drama,” nor do wolves “haunt Central Park at night”), but by far the biggest one is that it never acknowledges – nor even seems to conceive – is that there are levels of self-control that fall short of throwing your computer out the window and joining an ashram.

Like it or not (and only a “crank,” as Freeman confesses himself to be, would not), the technology of interpersonal communication has advanced beyond hand-delivered cards and letters, and society has to adjust. Those who’d rather not adjust are free to opt out – but kindly don’t drag the rest of us back to the escritoire with you.

– Liz Satterwaite

Will
Christopher Rush
Overlook Press, 2009

The double entendre that is the title of Christopher Rush’s bracing, brilliant new novel Will is shorthand for the inspired idea at the heart of the book: a lawyer has come to Stratford to take down the last will and testament of Will Shakespeare, who’s feeling old and ailing and doesn’t, we know, have long to live. Just that: just that simple: Rush uses the famous will to prod the famous Will to retrace the winding paths of his life and times, with the lawyer as first questioner and then quickly awestruck audience. And the lawyer’s not the only one; by the time half a dozen pages have passed, the reader is also awestruck – and mighty damn pleased. This is a book to grapple to you with hoops of steel, an entirely grand, roistering, true book that you know right away you’ll wish to savor, to inhabit, and to endlessly recommend.

Rush in his parting comments tells us that this novel has been “growing underground” for his entire life, and certainly the finished product shows it. There’s not a scene, not a scrap of dialogue, not a single throwaway observation that doesn’t spring wholly to life in your mind, and virtually every page features some passage that begs to be copied out longhand. For instance, here’s Will’s imagining of his mother’s grief at the death of her firstborn baby girl:

So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

Rush’s Will is having his final say about everything, in one headlong monologue after another, and as with the real Bard, you want to quote almost all of it – like the page-long rumination on the infamous Tower of London, a part of which reads like this:

Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitor’s Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of the scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles.The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head down on the block simply to let Henry Tudor’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.

Or Will’s grudging-generous tribute to Philip Henslowe, seedy proprietor of the Rose theater:

One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs re-working for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors).

We would expect a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare to be on display in a novel about the Swan of Avon (although countless novels have bungled their way into disarming that expectation), but what really shines in excerpts like these and countless others in the book is something more, a love of Shakespeare that suffuses everything about the man, his times, and his plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean times come alive on these pages, but the real treat here is the sense of the man. Actual biographies of Shakespeare can be a losing game, as Samuel Schoenbaum so amply demonstrated in his massive Shakespeare’s Lives (and as talented writers can play nonetheless, as, for instance, Charles Nicholl showed in his recent study The Lodger Shakespeare), and here fiction can act with more freedom. At one point Rush’s Shakespeare satisfyingly describes himself, saying “The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanor, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip” … and reading along, we can’t help but agree.

Novels as strong as Will don’t come along as often as anybody would wish. Under no circumstances miss this book.

– Steve Donoghue

Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation
Ludovico Ariosto, translated by David R. Slavitt
Belknap/Harvard, 2009

Translators disparage their predecessors only at great peril, for every translation stands as somebody’s favorite. Translators who disparage full-blown masterpieces of their art risk looking like fools. So may God’s eye be on David Slavitt, who nears these kinds of dangers from the moment he opens his mouth in the Translator’s Preface to his new version of Ariosto’s Renaissance masterpiece Orlando Furioso.

Ariosto’s enormous masterpiece (Charles Ross, in his Introduction to this present work, says Ariosto “never outdoes Dante – no one does,” but this is simplistic; Ariosto is in every way superior to the sacerdotal bore who birthed the Paradiso) was translated in 1975 by Barbara Reynolds, and her work is stunning, an incredible achievement. Slavitt says “it isn’t funny enough, or sprightly enough.” This is not only boorish but inaccurate – Reynolds is delightful company throughout, and Slavitt should recall that although Ariosto primarily wanted to entertain his audiences at the court of Ferrara, he also wanted to move them with fine sentiment finely phrased. In straining for the funny and the sprightly, Slavitt’s version (an abridgment, containing roughly half the length of the poem) far too often becomes something neither its author (nor those fine lords and ladies in his original audience) nor any but the laziest reader today would enjoy.

The Reynolds translation is accompanied by copious notes (Ariosto’s work, vastly allusive, benefits greatly from them) and glossaries; the Slavitt version has no notes and only the slimmest scrim of a glossary, but such appendixes are always secondary to the verse itself, and comparisons are inevitable. The poem is immense, and so examples abound, but we’ll pick just one: the moment when the pagan princess Angelica first confesses to the handsome young warrior Medoro that she’s in love with him (and with poor Orlando, who’s furioso over that very fact). Here’s Reynolds:

If of her longing she is not to die,
She must herself ask help without delay;
And well she knows that she cannot rely
On him she loves the needed words to say.
So, all restraint and modesty put by,
Her tongue, no less her eyes, dares now to pray
For mercy; from that blow she begs him save her
Which the fair youth, perhaps unknowingly, gave her.

And here’s Slavitt:

The girl understands what is happening perfectly well
and is beside herself. In desperation
she waives protocol and decides to tell
the youth what ails her, making a declaration
that he may choose to spurn (which would be hell
on wheels) or he could show appreciation
for what she’s done for him, or pity, or
even perhaps reciprocate and more.

There is a good deal more of this in Slavitt; people are dressed to the nines, they fall on their duffs, they “ad lib”. Everywhere in his version, there’s the air of horsing around with undergraduates (one couplet achieves its rhyme thus: “and in short order they approach Marseilles/and are happy after traveling all that weilles”). But the real difference is that the Reynolds version is poetry, where the Slavitt version is only disjointed narrative.

Slavitt calls the ottava rima stanza of Ariosto “inherently humorous,” but he seldom uses it in its pure form, opting instead for a loosey-goosey meter that sometimes succeeds in conveying Ariosto’s conversational moments but utterly fails to capture his lyrical side. This failure is abetted by Slavitt’s love of idiom and cliché – he’ll swerve a mile out of his way to hit a dated piece of slang, as can be seen in the fact that those mere eight lines contain four such turns of phrase.

The result is an Orlando Furioso that is purely for the moment. Most readers today are unfamiliar with Ariosto, which is monstrously unfortunate – his book is very long, yes (and no good service is rendered by abridging it – who these days would dare abridge the Commedia? But the Orlando Furioso is fair game?), but it’s also endlessly enjoyable. Readers who might otherwise be frightened off by the length and the verse might be tempted by Slavitt’s shorter (though still hefty) and more approachable version. If this happens – if peradventure twenty or even ten readers try Ariosto now who haven’t tried him before – then perhaps we can forgive Slavitt his sloppy liberties. His sins are many, but that would be a mighty atonement.

–Bartolomeo Piccolomini

Ford County
John Grisham
Doubleday, 2009

We don’t get to have it both ways; we can’t both deride our bestselling authors for being formulaic and automatically scorn their attempts to break out of the patterns that’ve served them so well. Alison Weir writes a historical novel and gets called a traitor to the Muse Clio; Thomas Pynchon writes a goofy stoner-gumshoe novella and gets bricks thrown at him in the pages of The Little Magazine; it isn’t fair – who are we to tell a successful writer, “no, no, stay right where you are so we can keep disparaging you”?

We get another chance to get it right with the release of Ford County, a collection of seven short stories by John Grisham. The author, as all the world knows, has written over a dozen legal thrillers that sell in their mindless gazillions. After producing a string of titles like The Appeal, The Summons, The Testament, and The Partner, Grisham could be reasonably suspected of having thoroughly surrendered to his whoredom – and yet, he’s also consistently wandered off-pasture, with non-jurisprudential novels like Skipping Christmas and Playing for Pizza. In Ford County, he tells several stories set in semi-rural Mississippi and is clearly aiming at that damned elusive sub-genre, “literary fiction.”

Webs dvd There are several problems with this, of course. Even leaving aside the fact that writing Southern fiction in America puts you in direct comparison (we won’t even speak of competition) with some of the greatest writers in the country’s literature, there’s the sad reality that writing muscles learn bad habits just as surely as weight-lifting muscles do; it’s arrogant for an author to think he can shed those bad habits just by adopting a drawl. It’s not just that Grisham doesn’t do much work to shed his legalese, although there’s that:

“Don’t quote me on that,” was a defensive ploy aimed at disclaiming what had just been said. Once properly disclaimed, others were free to go ahead and repeat what had just been said, but if the information turned out to be false, the original gossiper could not be held liable.

It’s more than that. “Literary fiction,” when it’s done well, is characterized by evocative settings, well-realized dialogue, and complex, satisfyingly lifelike characters. Successful legal potboilers don’t need any of those things, and writing those things well takes years and years of practice – and a certain amount of innate skill. You can’t achieve the same effect by having your characters interbreed like bunnies and then declaring a fiat, although Grisham tries:

“I figured out who she is. I’ve lived here for a long time, son, and I can’t remember much. But there was a time when most everybody knew who she was. One of her husbands was a cousin to one of my wives. I think that’s right. A long time ago.”

You gotta love small towns.

The whole point here is that you don’t gotta love small towns – the writer’s gotta make us love small towns, if that’s his goal. In legal thrillers, Grisham can simply tell us “she was mean,” and we’re expected to play along, to keep the story moving. In “literary” – that is, serious, adult – fiction, Grisham has to show us these things, and it’s no wonder he can’t really do it, considering how little practice he’s had.

We can’t fault him for trying in Ford County. There’s some good low-key comedy in this collection’s opening story, “Blood Drive,” for instance, and the best story, “Quiet Haven,” features as its narrator a nursing home grifter who inhabits an interesting moral grey zone that will satisfy all but the most fastidious short story reader. But there are far too many sassy waitresses, far too much Jim Beam in clinking glasses, far too many people reckoning instead of thinking – far too much caricature instead of character, in other words. The result feels like Southern-lite laptopped from a Chelsea loft during intermittent bursts of nostalgia.

The repair for this isn’t far to seek, but it’s clearly unpalatable to our yearning author. Grisham has written two full-length legal thriller novels in the last eight months, and there’s no reason on Earth not to think he’ll do the same thing in the next eight months. But if he’s serious about writing serious fiction – if he genuinely wants to reach that small slice of readers out there who’ve always disdained his very existence – he needs to take a couple of years off, do no legal thrilling, and try a little agonizing. We don’t get to have it both ways, but neither does he.

–Amanda Bragg