Uncertainty is the underlying difficulty with Shadow Country and what gives the book its ungainly length as it circles and circles this one character [Matthiessen’s main character Edgar Watson] in order to try to better make him out. But the menace of uncertainty, as it applies to life and therefore to all of us, is always just below the surface of events, giving a scary and intimate gravitas to what might otherwise be no more serious than the backwater violence of, say, James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Click on that link to read Sam’s entire piece on Shadow Country, and then do yourself a favor: go read some Matthiessen, especially if you’ve never done so before!

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Nicolás Wey Gómez read from Tropics of Empire, his controversial re-examination of the myth of Christopher Columbus. Open Letters‘ Bartolomeo Piccolomini reviewed the MIT Press book earlier this year, calling it “a highly detailed, joyously intellectual examination of how world-views occur and change gradually over time, but it is also a thrilling account of a world in upheaval, and a man determined, for whatever reason, to exploit that upheaval.”

Boston native Matthew Klane will read from his first full-length collection B___Meditations, a long poem-in-specimens, which “boomerangs beyond Darwin, beats around Bush, then heads back to Whitman.” Open Letters published selections from Matt Klane’s Che earlier this year, and Derek Henderson reviewed his anthology A Sing Economy, which will be on sale along with the new book.

And finally, curator of the litblog Stevereads and Open Letters Nonfiction Editor, Steve Donoghue will read from his recent exhumation of the father of get-well advice, Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), “Absent Friends: O True Apothecary!” Culpeper was right about tobacco and chestnuts, though, as Donoghue writes, “St. John’s Wort will do you none of the good it’s advertised in the case of snakebite, any more than the powdered head of a viper, applied to the bite site, will draw the venom. The juice of the Cuckow-Point may ease an earache or it may not, but gout will be unaffected by the application of those crushed berries …”

Please join us at 7pm on Monday, November 24th for a dose of alternative medicine to cure what Dr. Culpeper called the “pensive, grieving, vexing, pining, sighing, sobbing, fearful, careful spirits” winter calls in. And come meet Open Letters‘ editors and contributors at the …

brookline booksmith
279 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446-2908
617-566-6660

at 7pm

on Monday, November 24th

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That should be where the process ends, but it isn’t. You can’t help but read what other critics then say about the book, to compare their verdicts to yours. Sometimes, particularly if you wrestled with the book, those other reviews will convince you that you didn’t wrestle with it long enough. At other times, you’ll be so sure you understood the book perfectly that you’ll gape in astonishment at reviewers who don’t understand it the same way.

Two instances of this crop up in recent periodicals. Both the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement recently reviewed American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, and they were each having none of it. The TLS calls it “disappointingly commonplace,” and the LRB calls it “unconvincing,” but our own Steve Donoghue, reviewing it on our blog in September, praised it highly.

Likewise Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which Sam Sacks reviews in our November issue to largely positive effect. It was negatively reviewed recently in both the London Review of Books (“The plot has no twists and turns, no real surprises; there is no sleight of hand. The novel just rolls on like an Indian Railways train, from one stop to another …”) and The New York Times Book Review (“There is an absence of human complexity in The White Tiger, not just in its characters but, more problematically, in its depiction of a nation …”), and the contrast frustrates.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? While we appreciate any loyalty you feel inclined to show toward Open Letters, it’s the readers of these books who ultimately decide. And time, which often looks kindly on voices crying out in the wilderness.

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The physics of sound presents the musician with a problem – not everything can be in tune at once. Equal temperament is the common solution. It is not the only solution. Ross Duffin’s slim, accessible volume on the musician’s constant concern has finally been released in an accessibly priced paperback edition. It’s about time, too, since the $26 price tag on the hardcover made this a tough recommendation for those most devoted to equal temperament, the most important audience for Mr. Duffin’s argument. Despite the title, Mr. Duffin is not out to bash equal temperament, or those who use it. He acknowledges its elegance, its convenience, its place. His goal, rather, is to make people think:

It’s worth considering how it was that ET was embraced so completely…. So complete, in fact, has been the adoption of ET that most musicians today are not even aware that any other system…[has] any musical worth whatsoever. Non-ET systems have entered the realm of…“the limbo of that which is disregarded”

This is not a book about period instrument practice, historical performance, or only music over 258 years old. This is a book about the compromises involved in the equal tempered solution, and what was lost in its adoption. This is a book about other options. This is a book about what we do, and what we hear.

So many discussions of temperament focus on the keyboards as the instrument family most strictly requiring a solution, a fixed tuning. Duffin certainly doesn’t ignore this question, but his more important contribution is in broadening the conversation to include the rest of us who can, to greater or lesser degree, alter the pitch of a given note at will - to any woodwind player who’s ever sat through sectionals tuning the slow movement of a Beethoven symphony, or any string player curious about the options of quartet tuning.

After a crisp discussion of the acoustical source of the problem, and some of the many historical solutions to it, Duffin recommends an approach that is a meeting of theory and practice. Have you ever tried to tune a dominant seventh chord by looking at a tuner? (For me, it began at conservatory, in the above mentioned Beethoven rehearsal). Either it sounds right, or the 7th looks right on the box, one or the other. When the chord sounds good, the 7th registers flat on the equal-tempered machine. In my training, no one tried to deny this. No one offered a theory for it, either. Despite Duffin’s sometimes harsh expectations, we knew equal temperament wasn’t perfect. We just didn’t know what else was out there. This book is for anyone who wonders.

–Elizabeth Hardy

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The enormous popularity of this book – which is essentially a splenetic expansion of one chapter from the author’s faux-epic Silmarillion, courtesy of Tolkien’s son and very extremely industrious literary executor Christopher – was an enormous success when it was published last year, a testament to the reading public’s undying hunger for all things Middle Earth. In his forward, Christopher explains that long before his father wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he dreamt of writing long segments of the mytho-history that informed those later books.

Over the years, it has become a kind of good manners to take Christopher at his word when his forwards say such things, although the 40-something pages forming “Of Turin Turambar” in The Silmarillion tend to be very much more vigorous and stylish than anything found in the 200-plus pages of The Children of Hurin, except for those not-infrequent passages lifted from the former and plunked down into the latter. The story is the same: Turin son of Hurin has engendered the hatred of Morgoth, the First Age’s baleful Dark Lord (one of whose lieutenants is a little werewolf named Sauron), and that hatred prompts a shaggy dog story of revenge and counter-revenge. Readers who will whittle down the tall stacks of the book’s paperback in bookstores now will encounter chunks of J.R.R.’s signature prose:

Who knows now the counsels of Morgoth? Who can measure the reach of his thought, who ha been Melkor, mighty among the Ainur of the Great Song, and sat now, the dark lord on a dark throne in the North, weighing in his malice all the tidings that came to him, whether by spy or by traitor, seeing in the eyes of his mind and understanding far more of the deeds and purposes of his enemies than even the wisest of them feared, save Melian the Queen. To her often his thought reached out, and there was foiled.

And they will have Alan Lee’s vibrant color illustrations to spruce up, um, the rest.

–Steve Donoghue

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OL: You’ve lived in both Mexico and Europe. Do you think this has influenced your work away from the American grain?

Michela: Even though I have strong European influences, I am American with a range of work that encompasses its history from Jazz to 9/11. When I was a child I remember seeing old black and white photos of people at the beach. They must have been European. The beaches were vast. So were the women. Some were nude. The men wore slits as suits. I could feel the heat, the movement of those bodies, a community of breasts, legs, bellies. This was not New Hampshire where I was raised. I distinctly remember my mother’s 1950’s bathing suit: Playtex-like, a girdle with a stiff pointy bra. I belonged on that vast beach with its looseness and camaraderie. The seeds are planted early. OL: Robert Hughes famously said that America had produced no great erotic art. Though you’re not exclusively an erotic painter, do you think your own work places you outside of the ‘American tradition’?

Michela: I agree with Robert Hughes. Even though our society is sexualized, there is an absence of the erotic, passionate, and sensual in American painting. On occasion I have seen replicas of those beautiful Attic Greek vases in American homes sometimes sitting on a doily.

The nude is provocative and makes us conscious of our vulnerabilities.

OL: I see both elements of Mexican political art and European fauvism in your paintings. Do you consider yourself part of a larger historical tradition?

Michela: The painters that influenced me, that indeed taught me to paint, were European. I started to find my voice by lying in the bath. The tiles were large squares of marble with delicate streaks of gray running through them. I saw a line in those streaks that I was able to internalize.

For years I looked at Schiele, Kokoschka, Kirshner, Otto Dix, all the German Expressionists.

Quite recently while living in Europe and traveling I saw this Schiele line in many artists’ work. I learned this line was taught in the art schools of the time. Schiele went further than all of them and to this day I am moved. He keeps me honest.

I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I was there last when I was 19 years old and had begged my parents to let me stay in Europe. They didn’t.

Before I entered the galleries I sat in the musmuseumffee shop alone. I ordered coffee and a Viennese something wonderful pastry. It was quiet. I was served with a cloth napkin in a very old museum. It was gray black marble with white and gray streaks running through it. The Alte Museum. I was at last home. It took all my energy to leave and enter the galleries. I saw Schiele, but I had also come to see Ruben’s Nude in a Fur Coat, purportedly the first erotic painting. The date, 1630. In reproduction, the colors are strong. In person they are soft. The painting is astonishingly soft and so very sensual.

OL: In his a book about poetry, Nick Halpern described how a balance between “The Everyday and the Prophetic,” has defined most American poetry this century. I notice that tension in your own work: “Everyday,” because you refuse to artificially beautify many of your subjects (clawing hands, smudged faces), and “Prophetic,” because so you’re clearly not a “realist,” in that many of your subjects seem half-metaphorical, or spiritual, and your canvases seem always to be in motion. You seem to be both painting spiritual essences and to simultaneously be making a social comment. Do you find the intensity of each varies with your mood, or are you constantly in search of both? Or do you (as I’d suspect) recognize no demarcation?

Michela: No. There is no demarcation. I can not add anything more to what you have so generously and beautifully said.

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There’s J.M. Coetzee writing on the latest posthumous publications of Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder, The Ball, Snow, and The Courilof Affair, for example. Since the recent surprise popularity of Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, her writings have steadily garnered the belated attention of the literary world, as much for the pathos of her life story – she was sent to a concentration camp, where she died, after the Nazis overran France – as for anything she actually wrote. Coetzee is fascinating on both her life and her literature (he should write more book-essays), as when he asks the essential question: “Why did Irene Nemirovsky and her husband – who certainly had the means to do so – not flee while there was time?”

And he finds an answer: “As late as the end of 1941, Nemirovsky seems to have believed that whatever might befall the Jew in the street would not befall her.” This suggests just a hint of heartlessness, of willing indifference toward those Jews in the street, and it’s a quality Open Letters’ own Sam Sacks spotted also, in his November 2007 piece on Nemirovsky:

The only cause to which she was passionately devoted was that of writing her books. It’s amazing and in some ways heartening to realize that had the Nazis won World War II she would have continued writing her sharp, sapient novels as long as they would have let her (what’s heartening in that thought quickly turns to heartbreak when we in turn realize that the Nazis would not have—and did not—let her for long).

Elsewhere in this issue of the NYRB, the normally talented John Banville quite loses his head while writing about James Wood’s pompous, fussy, misleadingly titled, and weirdly unhelpful new book How Fiction Works. Banville loves his Wood, at one point gushing “Yes, yes, one simply cannot stop quoting [Wood, if you can believe it].”

At one point, Banville uses a word I very much dislike seeing tossed around in casual discourse, especially when it’s tossed at a book like How Fiction Works:

As we see, Wood’s aim is an admirably old-fashioned humanistic affirmation not only of the aesthetic but of the educational value inherent in art, and especially in the art of fiction.

To put it mildly, if Wood is dipping his toe at all in the pool of humanism, he’s staying rather loudly at the shallow end, surrounded by like-minded grenadiers intent more on proscribing what doesn’t work than extolling what does. Open Letters freelancer Daniel Green tackled How Fiction Works in August, warily:

Even if we were to concede the existence of large numbers of enthusiastic readers just waiting for the right literary critic to come along and illuminate the deeper mysteries of fiction for them, Wood’s book surely would not perform this task.

Also in the NYRB, Claire Messud, in an intelligently sensitive piece (she should write more book-essays), says of writer Marilynne Robinson, “Any story, Robinson reminds us, is many stories …” This discursiveness is both a curse and a blessing in Robinson’s writing, as Sam Sacks so marvelously explicated for us in December 2007.

And the last OLM echo in this issue? That would be an invigorating, thought-provoking article by Zadie Smith (she should write more book-essays) on two new novels, Remainder by Tom McCarthy and that bane of my existence, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. As some of you may recall, back in May I wrote a microreview of Netherland for our blog, briefly excoriating its ineptitude and expecting to think no more about it. But such peace was not to be! Every reviewer in Christendom has seen fit to give O’Neill’s book time and attention, and virtually all of them have praised it.

Needless to say, they’re all wrong and I’m right, and even while praising the book, Smith proves this – by quoting the book, always a risky proposition when the book you’re praising stinks. She quotes a long passage (they all feel long) in which our narrator indulges in some sentimental reverie, and then she writes this astonishing little apology:

This paragraph is structured like a recognized cliché (i.e., We had come , as they say, to the end of the road). It places before us what it fears might be a tired effect: in this case, the nostalgia-fused narrative of one man’s retrospection (which is to form the basis of this novel). It recognizes that the effect’s inauthenticity, its lack of novelty, even its possible dullness – and it employs the effect anyway. By stating its fears Netherland intends to neutralize them. It’s a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows.

Alternately, it could be a novel that not only stinks but stinks right out in the open. I mean honestly! What piece of trash couldn’t be exonerated by this miraculous get-out-of-jail-free card of Smith’s? A writer gets to write bad prose if he winks at us while he’s doing it? Hasn’t the literary world swallowed enough of that from James Joyce, without anointing a successor?

Ah, but these are merely the echoes – you owe it to yourself to read the whole of this New York Review of Books, which, as anniversary issues go, is a huge demonstration of why the world is a better place with the NYRB in it.

–Steve Donoghue

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Don’t skip this review because you’re not vegan. This cookbook is so awesome that even those self-proclaimed “carnivores” (sorry there T. rex, but you’re an omnivore) will find themselves enjoying their vegetables. This is the third cookbook by vegan superstars Moskowitz and Romero, and aside from a few (acknowledged) repeat recipes, it is the most fun cookbook I’ve ever read. They write great intros to each recipe, and even manage to make the recipe text amusing:

Combine all ingredients on a rimmed baking sheet (the “rimmed” part is essential, since you don’t want the oil dripping off into the oven and causing a fire. Or do you?).

Of course, with a cookbook, form must follow function. The book is quite user-friendly, with icons identifying quick recipes, special diet recipes (soy/gluten/fat-free), and recipes with readily available ingredients. Although they do throw in the occasional obscure ingredient, I’ve been able to get by with Whole Foods and my local co-op. But if you’ve been looking for an excuse to go to the Asian grocery store, the Veganomicon will not disappoint.

The best part of this book is its versatility—I see recipes as guidelines and can’t help making at least one change. While the recipes lend themselves to easy substitutions, the book as a whole gives the free-form cook all of the basics. I probably use the “How to Cook a Vegetable” chapter more than anything else—it tells you how to roast, grill, and steam everything. The “Mix and Match” chapter also is incredibly useful if, like myself, you’re only cooking for one. But do not fear, strict constitutionalists: everything is delicious as intended, if you do not feel like playing with your food.

Wheat-free Chocolate Chip Cookies

1¾ c oat flour
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
¼ c brown sugar
½ c granulated sugar
c canola oil
1 tbsp ground flaxseeds
¼ c soymilk
1 tsp vanilla
¾ c chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Sift together the oat flour, baking soda, and salt.

In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the flaxseeds and soymilk. Add the brown and granulated sugars and stir, add the oil and vanilla, and whisk vigorously until all ingredients are emulsified (about a minute).

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry, fold in the chocolate chips.

Drop the batter by the tablespoon onto an ungreased baking sheet, leaving 1½ inches of space between the cookies. Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack to cool the rest of the way.
Makes 18 cookies.

–Sara Shaffer

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It is no mean skill to write a gripping thriller. Comedy is easy, as Michael Frayn famously snarled, suspense is hard. Michael Crichton was the sparest of stylists: poor with character but terrific on plot. Plenty of readers shot thorough his books in one sitting and the best of those books—Sphere, Next, Eaters of the Dead, and of course Jurassic Park—will continue to screw with the heart-rhythms of grateful and exhausted fans.

Crichton was the rarest of characters: an open-minded skeptic (notoriously, in the case of global warming, to our detriment). He learned and lived enough for several lives in the space of sixty-six years. Those who sample his impressively readable memoir, Travels, will saw through cadavers at Harvard, leap across train cars with Sean Connery, scale Kilimanjaro, fumble their way through the swinging Hollywood 70s, and learn to see auras and feel chakras and self-exorcise and travel along the astral plane.

Michael Crichton published fifteen thrillers under his own name and at least ten under pseudonyms. The racy John Lange books were wound of plots that hit the ground running and sprinted without letting up toward enormously satisfying finishes. Some of these are coming back into print, and about time too. Of the seven films directed by Crichton, one, Westworld, is a minor classic. And The 13th Warrior is as exciting a movie as Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton’s thrillers have brought chills and pleasure to millions of readers. For that and for a life (mostly) well-lived, we will warmly remember him as we mourn his passing.

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It’s become a symbolic moment recognized identically all over the world: the pop of the champagne cork and the giddy rush of effervescence that is virtually synonymous with laughter. But in 1815, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the Veuve (widow) Clicquot, was hardly celebrating. She was faced with more orders for her celebrated sparkling wines than she could fill, largely because the traditional methods of creating those wines were slowing her down. Tilar Mazzeo, in her playful and entirely enjoyable new biography of the Veuve Clicquot, draws the scene:

In the cellars, she tried to urge her workers to speed the process, but they told her it couldn’t be done.
“You have only fifty thousand bottles ready,” she told them. “I asked for double!”
“Madame,” they replied, “you can’t ship muddy wines.”
“No, I want to ship very clear wines and in sufficient quantity.”
“You will never get it,” the workers assured her. “No one knows any other method besides the one we are using.”
“I will find one,” she promised.

The method, of course, was to store the bottles neck-down, which causes all the various sediments and residues to collect at the top of the bottle – and come jetting out when the cork is pulled correctly. It’s amazing, throughout Mazzeo’s book, to encounter scenes like this one and try to imagine a world where “popping the cork” has no particular meaning. Everywhere in this book are equally fascinating tidbits, like the ideal conditions for the harvest:

The grapes were best when harvested on cool, foggy mornings, while the moisture of the dew left the fruit plump and full of juice. The early hours were critical for the production of champagne, because this vin gris – a white wine made with red grape varietals – depended on the immediate and gentle pressing of grapes unstained by the color of the skins.

The rare and minor slip (for instance, the widow’s freedom to run her own business affairs was hardly “unique” to revolutionary France; widows had enjoyed that freedom in many countries, since at least the time of Chaucer, if not Julius Caesar) can be happily ignored in light of the book’s many joys. Oenophiles are only the most obvious part of its audience: everyone who’s ever celebrated anything should read this book, and then hoist one to the Widow.

–Steve Donoghue

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The Virginia Quarterly Review has announced the winner and runners-up of its young reviewer contest. The winner is Emily Wilkinson, who’s also a blogger for the fine site The Millions. And that’s all very well, but what really catches the eye is that former Open Letters contributor Giles Harvey is one of the finalists. Giles’ submitted piece is unfortunately not linked, but curious readers are invited to return to his review in these pages of J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year to discover what it was the VQR judges liked so much. Congrats Giles, our newest award bridesmaid!

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Barack Obama has been elected the 44^th President of the United States. Open Letters offers warm congratulations.

Though we make no political endorsements, it would be blindness to survey the debris of the last eight years and not forthrightly conclude the Presidency of George W. Bush has been a disaster and a tragedy for our country. The editors acknowledge the tumult ahead – an accumulation of crises greater than any in the last half century. But last night’s election has left us exulted and relieved, and not just because Obama is a fine prose stylist (though that certainly helps around here); not just because he is a learned man familiar with history and philosophy and literature, though we’d make that a prerequisite for the office. It is not even because we have finally and decisively rejected the dark path we’ve been traveling and begun to cut a new one. These are worthy reasons, but there is another, one that undergirds the others and adds a visceral charge to the events of November 4; one that made this an election victory unlike any in our national memory. It could be seen in the celebrations at Grant Park in Chicago, in the spontaneous eruptions of joy in front of the White House, and in the teary eyes of students at Spellman College.

In his acceptance speech before a jubilant crowd of hundreds of thousands, Obama said “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” It is tempting to call this hubris, but we must remember history.

Three hundred and eighty nine years ago the Dutch ship White Lion landed at Old Point Comfort, the site of Fort Monroe in present-day Virginia. Damaged from storm and from battle, they sold the labor-starved colonists twenty human beings in exchange for food and repairs. These were America’s first slaves. Slaves were finishing the walls and ceilings of the White House when John Adams moved in. Black Americans were no longer slaves when Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox in 1865, but it would be a hundred years of suffering and protest before the law granted equality. More than forty years later the legacy of slavery and segregation is alive in our inner cities and in the stark whiteness of our college campuses. But today a black American has been elected President. Whatever your politics, that fact alone is occasion enough for joy and – to pilfer a phrase worn weary by two years of campaigning – a cause for hope.

-The Editors

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The New York Times Book Review has an “essay” on the reading habits of American Presidents of the past and the future but most conspicuously, not the present. It’s an edifying but altogether tepid article; not a single judgment confidently uttered, not one chance taken. Ignore the byline and the author is obvious still; the room-temperature prose and sadomasochistic even-handedness loudly announce (or rather, calmly denote in a monotone) this as the work of Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. Essays are supposed to contain opinions; even Montaigne wasn’t this amiable. Then again, one supposes that no other writer for the NYTBR would get reading lists from the current candidates for President

It’s no surprise that McCain venerates the lost causiness of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he’s apparently read Gibbon twice (we’re not told if it was abridged). According to Meacham, “when I asked [Obama] by e-mail to send a list of books and writers that were most significant to him” (a typical Jon Meacham Hallmark card phrase), he listed “American standards:”

The Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk,” King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Among writers from abroad, he singles out Graham Greene (“The power and the Glory” and ‘The Quiet American”’), Doris Lessing (“The Golden Notebook”), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” and Gandhi’s autobiography. 

More troubling, depending upon your point of view, are his mentions of the genius psycho Friedrich Nietzsche and the Reinhold Niebuhr, he of the Christian “just war” doctrine. Presidents of the past made uneven choices as well. Jefferson read Enlightenment thinkers but Kennedy liked Ian Fleming. Lincoln knew Shakespeare but Reagan read Edgar Rice Burroughs, including, Meacham notes, a story in which “a special space shield protects Earth from invading Martians.”

–Greg Waldmann

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Which is not, of course, to say the issue is perfect–but that’s part of the comfort of reading: there’s always something to object to. Why, for instance, has Reuel K. Wilson written about the journal entries of Edmund Wilson as though Wilson and Mary McCarthy were characters he learned about in a textbook, instead of the people who were in fact his parents? (The photograph of the three together provides an unnerving contrast to the oddly aloof tone Reuel K. Wilson assumes.) And who does Mark Danner think he’s fooling when he affects to cover the Obama and McCain campaigns as though he just flew in from Mars and has no prior leanings toward either candidate. The fog of insincerity that smothers the piece make its depictions seem false, however prettily described.

But the excellent far outweighs the spotty: Daniel Mendelsohn gushes beautifully about Constantine Cavafy and Ian Buruma tempers admiration with unpleasant biography in a heartfelt look at V.S. Naipaul. Anthony Grafton writes with customary wit about Giordano Bruno and the mighty Helen Vendler blends analyses of the lives, letters, and poems of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Those who read Dan Green’s breakdown of James Wood’s latest work of criticism in Open Letters will be interested to see John Banville tackle the same. David Bromwich, like Joan Didion before him, writes a blood-boiling piece on that most blood-boiling of character, Dick Cheney. And a smorgasborg more of pieces on subjects from Auden to King Hussein are there to pull you out of the day’s headlines and into the relaxed back rooms of the intellect.

The greatest challenge The Review has faced has been internal: co-editor Barbara Epstein’s death in 2006. Epstein was a crucial counterpoint to Robert Silvers, who is most comfortable with heavygoing works of scholasticism and meticulous critiques of current affairs; Epstein, in contrast, had a knack for bringing in younger writers and more idiosyncratic voices. Her absence is still felt, but there has at least been a conscious effort to fill that gap, best seen here with a curious essay from Zadie Smith about the future of the novel. It’s a terrific issue, worthy of the event. And it remains, as it was from its inception, one of the most stimulating and enjoyable periodicals in which to take sanctuary.

–Sam Sacks

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Also: be sure to join us on Monday, 24 November 2008 at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith for our next Open Letters Reading – wine and cheesy bits (and sparkling performances by all our readers!) will be cheerfully provided!

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In his choppy but spirited sophomore novel The Dart League King, Keith Lee Morris tries gamesomely to make a mountain from a molehill. The premise of the book is flauntingly trivial: in a tiny town in Idaho a league dart match is waged at a local bar. Russell Harmon, our lovable loser of so much sitcom lore, is the reigning dart league king; however, on this night he’s pitted against Brice Habersham, formerly a professional dart thrower.  

Gradually, though, into the foreground of this rather sweetly generic landscape, Morris inserts an increasingly manic and bizarre menagerie of subplots. Russell owes money to a coke dealer who may decide that night to kill him over the debt; a local beauty (with “breasts as large as grapefruits”—Morris gets lazy when it comes to characterizing women) reveals to one of the dart players that he is the father of her child; one of Russell’s teammates becomes deranged from his secret knowledge behind the news report of a missing college student; and an FBI agent plans to arrest Russell and his dealer as part of a drug sting—after competing in the match, of course.

These melodramas are crudely knotted together by way of some exceedingly unlikely behavior in a manner that’s as entertaining as it is heavy handed. Each character, moreover, gets the benefit of a narrative voice, and the style of the prose in every chapter alternates to reflect their different backgrounds and attitudes. Morris has a humorous, easygoing colloquial touch (television writing seems an inevitability), but a few too many voices, particularly that of Vince the vengeful drug dealer, fall short of resolving into plausible people:

…you could just leave old Vince out of the big money, he’d just go on making his money slowly, slowly, because that way he could sleep nights like he hadn’t for a while, partly because of the fucking meth on the streets now, this homemade cheap-ass shit that Vince wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, all these amateurs cooking up this shit in their trailers out in the fucking boonies, but primarily because of this dickwad Russell Harmon, this goddamn addicted fuzzy-brained numb-nuts who wouldn’t pay his legitimately accrued debts…

The debt to George Saunders in this fragment is found on virtually every page of The Dart League King, so it’s not surprising that the best bits of the novel flourish from its most mundane aspects. The dart matches are terrific, joyously suspenseful in the infallible tradition of come-from-behind sports stories. When Morris tries to attain comparable suspense from his more operatic subplots he goes amiss. The end of the novel especially is weird and disturbing to no clear purpose (it’s a horrific scene involving the missing student and the grapefruit-breasted woman). Morris is taking a risk with it, and you can’t exactly grudge him for that, but nevertheless it feels like a fucking lame-ass douche move (as Vince might put it) to drop the reader from the highs of an underdog dart triumph to a meaninglessly grisly and shocking finale.

                                                                                                       –Sam Sacks

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There is a special magic to be found in the writing of William Least-Heat Moon – or not to be found, since its peculiar wavelengths don’t guarantee universal visibility. He is, of course, the author of Blue Highways, the seminal American travel book instantly adopted by thousands of quasi-hippies desperate to find the “real” America, the small-town soul of a country rapidly becoming too big and too loud. The magic of which this author is capable is nowhere more easily seen than in that weird, self-indulgent masterpiece, and as in all such cases, readers wanted desperately to recapture that magic in the author’s subsequent books.

This is a common urge, but it’s grossly unfair. Half the magic we find in the few books that provide it comes from timing, from specific and irreproducible circumstances in our lives when we happened to find them. The author, poor well-intentioned soul that he is, has no control over such variables, but suddenly there his evil publisher is, urging him to recreate lightning in a bottle. Some author’s try, inevitably adulterating their legacy. Others just keep doing what they do, hoping audiences will follow.

That latter is William Least-Heat Moon, our modern-day Thoreau, our loafing, wandering prose Whitman, although those things are spoken by a long-time appreciator, not only of Least-Heat Moon’s writing, but of the leafy, quiet-at-night country lanes and by-streets that are his best and surest subject. If you grant that he is capable of writing masterpieces (again, opinions vary), Least-Heat Moon has written a solid number of them: there’s Blue Highways, and PrairyErth, and River-Horse, and now his latest, Roads to Quoz, which has something less than the epic confidence of those earlier books but is still a thing of strange wonders and effortless yarns. All of them are presented with his customary winning voice:

As I calculated a different route northward to get us into as much territory as possible without retracing miles of it, I came up with a course generally following the Allagash River, but I couldn’t shake my disappointment, at least not until the breeze slackened enough to let black flies find me. I continued figuring, slapping, measuring, slapping, marking, slapping, cursing, slapping, slapping, and finally going back into the cramped office. If those little botherations can drive a half ton of moose to near frenzy, why should a man feel unmanly by retreating behind screen windows? “Got to you, did they?” the gatekeeper said. “Now you’ll scratch for a week.”

Least-Heat Moon defines “quoz” as anything worth finding on the journey, anyplace worthy of idiosyncratic interest. His own books are perfect illustrations of the term.

                                                                                                                               –Steve Donoghue

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“Before you can hope to become even a passable guest,” Emily Post wrote in her eruptively readable 1922 classic Etiquette, “let alone a perfect one, you must learn as it were not to notice if hot soup is poured down your back. If you neither understand nor care for dogs or children, and both insist in climbing all over you, you must seemingly like it.” It was a revelation – not so much for the proscriptive guide to behavior itself (Laura Claridge, in her stunning and unprecedented new biography of Post, points out that mongrel Americans have always been hungry consumers of behavioral guides) but for the sharp and witty confidence of its prose. It poured from the book in a cold and utterly refreshing stream.

Etiquette was written as the “roaring ‘20s” were igniting and the need seemed greater than ever for a guide to proper and gracious behavior. Fashionable young partygoers are reminded that it is not considered “smart to be late,” and newly-liberated young women are warned that too much freedom can be a bad thing. Likewise Claridge’s Emily Post is fortuitous in its timing, not only because there’s never been an actual biography of her subject before, but also because the 2000-aughts have spawned a culture at least as rife with uncontrolled freedoms as the ‘20s. It’s good to be reminded that somebody like Emily Post ever existed, and Claridge does this with skill and the historian’s ear for contextualization:

In the middle of the decade, Emily was writing the rules of proper behavior for a population whose first lady wore flapper clothes so effectively that the couturier Charles Worth awarded her a French locket on behalf of the garment industry. In her personal shape, unlike the increasingly plump author, Grace Coolidge, with her slender, athletic body and her interest in sports, captured the epoch perfectly. Rumor had it that female skiers were even training to compete in the next Olympic games.

In her great book and its many subsequent revised editions, Emily Post coached nearly a century of Americans on how to comport themselves and think well of their neighbors. She did more than any other individual to try to civilize the country, surely a worthy goal. In Claridge’s wonderful new book, she is at last given the worthy biography she’s always deserved.

                                                                                                                                    –Steve Donoghue

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This constraint soon became apparent in the one arena in which women’s were the dominant voices: the experience of the bereaved. Despite the fact that about a quarter of the victims of the attacks on the twin towers were female, widows were everywhere and widowers nowhere. The media favorites were pregnant widows, with stay-at-home mothers a close second, all of whom were repeatedly, relentlessly interviewed about their grief, their fears, and their all-consuming focus on their children. But as the event receded into the past, more and more of the widows began to go “off-script,” moving on with their lives and going back to work—and, Faludi shows, earning themselves much less flattering scrutiny in the process.

Ronald Brownstein approaches history from the angle of political partisanship in The Second Civil War–it’s a delicately partisan subject itself, but Greg Waldmann reports that Brownstein artfully dodges the typical minefields that bring down so many political histories:

What separates The Second Civil War from the usual hackery is its century-spanning history of political warfare. What begins as a wonderfully succinct evaluation of the 1896 Presidential election expands as the author incorporates statistics, anecdotes, polls and demographics to throw the insular world of the capital into wide relief. Beginning that year, the McKinley-Bryan race “ended a period of extended political disorder” and inaugurated the “age of partisan armies,” a period of “intense conflict between remarkably unified partisan coalitions.” Presidents were elected with overwhelming majorities in Congress, and sought consensus within their parties in order to overwhelm the opposing party.

Andrea Barrett’s most recent novel The Air We Breathe continues in the tradition of her earlier work–fiction utilizes themes from science and natural history–but Karen Vanuska points out that there is a new, successful twist here:

In a Barrett story, finding the fossil, mapping the Himalayas, or building an X-Ray machine is far easier than telling a woman her hair ribbon is attractive or telling a man that you like his sextant. Misunderstandings and disappointments are the stuff upon which her fiction is usually built. However, in The Air We Breathe, the stakes are much higher than discovering the winter nesting grounds of swallows. While it would be asking too much of Barrett to leave her scientific comfort zone entirely—and yes, in this novel we must endure opaque quotes from nineteenth century chemistry textbooks and detailed passages on the development of X-Ray technology—World War I thankfully intervenes.

Shop wisely and read well!

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The sexual abuse scandal that engulfed the Catholic Church throughout the early 1990s was the worst catastrophe that venerable body had had to endure since Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. That former upheaval cost the Church money, lands, men, and prestige; the latter ended up costing the Church a great deal of the two things the intervening centuries had left her: money, and even more prestige.

The press broke the story nationally. Young men came forward by the dozens and claimed they had been sexually abused as boys by priests under the employ of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston. The public outcry – and the lawsuits detailed in Timothy Lytton’s book Holding Bishops Accountable - became too great even for the Catholic Church to ignore; inquiries were set afoot, depositions were taken, priests who should long ago have been expelled from the clergy were defrocked and sometimes jailed, and Cardinal Law was recycled back to an honorarium and a sinecure.

Lytton contends that these lawsuits served a civic purpose:

Victims, their lawyers, and activists make up a third significant public that exerted pressure to put clergy sexual abuse on the institutional policy agendas of church and government officials. Litigation often has the effect of mobilizing such groups. Lawsuits personalize and dramatize social issues, and resulting press coverage disseminates information about them. Lawsuits and the publicity they generate embolden victims to speak out, educate lawyers about how to litigate more effectively, and provide activists a flag around which to rally.

He’s no doubt correct about all this, but the fact is, nobody involved in this whole tragedy was trying to help anybody else. The various litigants wanted retribution upon the Church that had shuffled predatory pedophiles from one parish to another; the lawyers wanted in on the legal story of the decade; and the Catholic Church, it can be said with almost mortal certainty, would have done nothing at all had it not been caught.

Still, Lytton’s book, though blandly written, is an important brick in the wall that will stop any of it from happening again, and it deserves commendation at least for that.

                                                                                                                        –Steve Donoghue

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