The Beiderbecke Affair

A Recommendation: Caravans

When James A. Michener died in 1997 at the age of 90, he left behind 40 books and a reputation as a popular, if not a literary, author. His famously long novels—from Hawaii to Alaska, from Centennial to Chesapeake—were reflections of both his wanderlust and his abiding respect for the history and cultures of an entire world of people. He was an orphan himself. “I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can’t afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.”

I grew up on Michener—by the end of junior high school I had plowed through two of his fattest tomes—but until the recent wars, I had neglected his 1963 novel, Caravans. At just 336 pages, it’s a tight, talky, and wonderfully insightful piece of work set entirely in Afghanistan. The novel centers on Mark Miller, a young American diplomat stationed in 1946 Kabul, who is charged to find Ellen, a woman who married an American-educated Afghan named Nazrullah and then disappeared. He eventually finds her among a group of nomads. Miller’s traveling companion, meanwhile, is Dr. Otto Stiglitz, a Nazi war criminal.

More than forty years after the publication of Caravans, we live in a world obsessed with competing moral visions (e.g., torture is necessary when we do it, evil when they do it). But these are hardly new, as Michener suggests over and over. His characters struggle with the barbarity of traditional culture even as they are confronted with the overwhelming force and, yes, barbarity of encroaching modernism. Nazrullah, for instance, makes an impassioned speech suggesting that, for all its faults, at least Afghanistan is no Germany (i.e, we stone women and children but at least we don’t gas them).

I went to Germany at the age of twenty. Before that I’d been educated by private tutors whose main job, it seems to me now, was to impress me with the moral depravity of Afghanistan and the timeless glory of Europe. I knew no better than to accept their indoctrination at face value and reported to Germany fully prepared to exhibit my tutors’ prejudices. But when I reached Göttingen I found that the true barbarians were not the primitives who stone women in Ghazni—and we have some real primitives in this country—but the Germans. From 1938 through 1941 I remained as their guest, to witness the dreadful degeneration of a culture which might once have been what my tutors claimed but was now a garish travesty. Believe me, Miller, I learned more in Germany than you’ll ever learn in Afghanistan.

As you know, I went from Germany to Philadelphia, where half the people thought I was a Negro. What I didn’t learn in Germany, you taught me. Why do you suppose I wear this beard? Before I grew it I made a six-week experiment. I decided to be a Negro . . . lived in Negro hotels, ate in their restaurants, read their papers and dated Negro girls. It was an ugly, ugly life, being a Negro in your country . . . maybe not so bad as being a Jew in Germany, but a lot worse than being an Afghan in Ghazni. To prove to Philadelphians I wasn’t a Negro, I grew this beard and wore a turban, which I had never worn at home.

But what I love about Michener is that he doesn’t settle for the easy argument. Ellen eventually leaves Nazrullah for the Nazi Stiglitz, who converts to Islam. The Jewish Miller is forced to confront the German, while the Afghan assures him that purity—racial, moral—exists only in Hitler’s head. “If the facts were known,” Nazrullah tells Miller, “probably half our Afghan heritage is Jewish. For hundreds of years we boasted of being one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The Hitler decreed us to be Aryans, which gave us certain advantages.”

Later Ellen describes her own disillusionment—with the easy bigotry of Americans during the war years, with “kept professors” whose “moral responsibility was to dissect the world” but who instead “were paid to defend it.” Her father, she explains, was one of those men.

“What I mean is, my father described anything out of the ordinary as ridiculous, and I wanted to outrage his whole petty scale of judgment. What was the most ridiculous thing I could do? Run off with an Afghan who had a turban and another wife.” She laughed a little, then added, “Do you know what started my disillusionment with Nazrullah? That turban. He wore it in Philadelphia for show. He’d never think of wearing it in Kabul.”

Of course, Ellen does top herself when she trades in her manly turban for a mixed-up Nazi. No easy answers, little room for self-righteousness—this is what I love about Michener.

IMAGE: The rugged Afghan landscape

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: Bangkok 8

We’re all exasperated with the police at one time or another. But in Bangkok, the pique is simply more acute.

“I used to buy whole trays of Rolex watches for police officers,” the city’s top sex tycoon complained to The New York Times in July 2003. “I used to carry cash in black plastic bags for them. But they are still harassing me.”

In John Burdett’s 2003 thriller Bangkok 8, the half-Thai, half-American, all-Buddhist detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep—as dry and charming as a good martini—explains the mores of this place the locals call Krung Thep:

“You must understand, the Royal Thai Police Force has always been way ahead of its time. It’s run like a modern industry, every cop is a profit center.”

Jitpleecheep’s good-natured defense of the corruption that surrounds his city’s thriving drug and sex trades is for the benefit of FBI agent Kimberley Jones (whom he likes to refer to as “the FBI,” as in “The FBI has a good figure . . .”).

Gun-loving and sexually frustrated, Jones is in Bangkok to 1) assist in Jitpleecheep’s investigation into the murder of an American marine whose car suddenly and mysteriously fills with venomous snakes; 2) provide an unlikely romantic interest for the hyper-meditative Jitplecheep; and 3) play the dumb Westerner, to whom Jitpleecheep can expound on the Asian way of doing things.

It’s a set-up that could go one of two ways: cheap or deep. Burdett threatens the former with sometimes-cartoonish cultural exaggerations—Jones parading around in a T-shirt that reads, “So many men, so little time,” Jitpleecheep musing, “On the way to my own hovel I meditate on my penis.”

What redeems the periodic nonsense is the fact that Jitpleecheep is such a fascinating character. Although he has taken a religious pledge to refuse bribes, he is bent on revenging his beloved partner, Pichai, who was killed by a cobra at the scene of the crime. When his detective work takes him deep into Bangkok’s red light district, he considers anew his Thai mother’s participation in the oldest profession, the consequences of which turn out to be unexpectedly fortuitous. And he pushes her to finally reveal the identity of his father.

Burdett’s novel conjures a wonderfully complex and humane Bangkok, a Third World city as overwhelmed by its own corruption as by its many visitors seeking drugs and sex. But what makes Bangkok 8 such a wonderful read is Jitpleecheep’s nearly pitch-perfect narration. He is at once hilarious, poignant and Buddha-obsessed, a man not simply caught between two cultural worlds, but two metaphysical ones, as well:

“In meditation there is a point where the world literally collapses, providing a glimpse of the reality which lies behind. I am experiencing the collapse but not the salvation. The city falls and rebuilds itself over and over while I wait in the heat.”

In trying to change the ring on his mobile phone, Jitpleecheep achieves insight into the East-West divide. Despite 15 choices—including the American national anthem, but not the anthem of any other country—he is forced to settle on Star Wars, a tune already used by one of his colleagues. “Angrily I realize that Motorola has led me down a labyrinth of apparent choice leading to a dead end. I found the perfect paradigm of Western culture, but without Pichai to share it with, who gives a shit anyway?”

On the subject of sex, as on phones, Jitpleecheep is curiously engaged. Pichai’s mother, like his own, was a prostitute. “As her English improved she reported back to Pichai the substance of her customers’ love babble. To look for nirvana in someone’s crotch, now that really is dumb. For Pichai the horror was that these spiritual dwarfs were taking over the world.”

Burdett only stumbles when he insists on cramming his research into the mouths of helpless characters. For instance, from Kat, an exotic performer who shoots darts out her privates, we receive this unusually articulate observation: “The West tries to turn the act of sex into a religious experience, when to us it is no more than scratching an itch.”

Then, rather more like a graduate student than someone all-the-while popping balloons in the above manner, she points out that in “Japan and South Korea, prostitution declined dramatically as the economy improved. When our economy improves, the number of prostitutes tends to go up rather than down.”

These sorts of lectures only get worse upon the appearance, two-thirds the way through, of a plastic surgeon, at which point the plot swerves down some pretty strange alleyways.

Whatever you do, don’t expect anything neat or conventional at the end of Bangkok 8, not with Jitpleecheep at the wheel.

“This isn’t a whodunit, is it?” he sighs to himself.

No, it isn’t. For Jitplecheep, for Burdett, that would be just too . . . Western.

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: War Trash

On the dust jacket of War Trash, journalist Robert B. Kaplan declares that Ha Jin’s 2004 novel about Chinese prisoners during the Korean War “is not just a novel. It’s a historical document about a forgotten part of a forgotten war.”

He’s wrong. It’s not.

War Trash is just a novel, albeit a very good one. In it, Yu Yuan—who, as an old man, is writing a memoir of his captivity—vividly describes the horror and absurdity of war. The setting is Korea, but the high casualties will remind you of World War II; the napalm and the politics of Vietnam; and a particularly gruesome beheading scene of the current conflict in Iraq. If you don’t know much about the Korean War, fine. But what matters most is this: War is war is war is war.

Yu is as innocent as Adam. Despite having graduated from a military academy, he is unprepared for the reality of battle. His shock is almost poignant. “Never had I thought that the war could be so chaotic and bloody,” he writes after his unit crosses the Yalu River into North Korea in March 1951. When, after an artillery barrage, a soldier is diagnosed with shell shock, he laments, “Never had I thought a man’s mind was so easy to destroy.”

Cut off from the main Chinese army and surrounded, Yu and a handful of comrades slowly starve. Foraging for food proves to be dangerous work. “On average every twenty pounds of rice cost one man, so we mainly ate herbs, grass, and mushrooms, waiting for the fall when the wild chestnuts would ripen,” Yu recalls with characteristic reserve.

Eventually, he is captured and shipped to a POW camp in Pusan. There, the Chinese prisoners organize themselves within their compounds according to Nationalist and Communist sympathies. With American assistance, the Nationalists take control and ruthlessly set about strong-arming their fellow prisoners into refusing repatriation to the mainland. Those who balk, like Yu, are tattooed with anti-Communist or pro-Taiwanese slogans. Others are not so lucky.

Yu has no love for Mao. He only wants to return home to his aging mother and his lovely fiancée. But neither is he completely welcome among the Communists because of his Nationalist ties back home.

Yu’s disillusionment with the ideologues on both sides forms the knotty and sorrowful center of the novel. They use him for his knowledge of English—which conveniently provides him access to much of what goes on in the camp—only to betray him later. Although the novel doesn’t hide where Yu will eventually end up, readers will wonder how he’ll ever get there.

A critic once remarked on the “radical naiveté” of Jin’s fiction. A native of China, Jin has lived in the United States since 1985 and now teaches at Boston University. In his novels, like the National Book Award-winning Waiting, or 2002’s The Crazed, the prose style and characters are simple and unadorned, especially when compared to the complex sweep of history. Never is that more true than in War Trash. Yu’s wide-eyed amazement can be almost laughable. When the camp’s Communist boss orders a symbolic protest that costs the lives of dozens of inmates, only to reward them afterward with “medals,” Yu is skeptical.

“I had been awarded three already,” he muses, “but never had I seen a medal, and I couldn’t help but doubt their value . . . These awards might just be a hoax.”

Really, Yu? Do you think so?

Such naiveté, however, sets Yu (and the reader) up for a series of ironic twists and makes them all the more devastating. Even shopworn truths carry new force, as when a prisoner levels this charge against the Communists: “History has shown that the Communists always treat their enemies more leniently than their own people. Only by becoming their significant enemies can you survive decently.”

It is a testament to Jin’s skill as a writer that old news can seem fresh again.

The Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld once said that “without the naiveté still found among the children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed.” In Appelfeld’s novels, which are generally set prior to the Holocaust, the Jews are educated and world-weary, yet completely oblivious of their impending doom.

In War Trash, the full weight of history has arrived, and it methodically feeds itself on the lives and spirits of Yu and his Chinese countrymen. That we already know how it must end is beside the point: War is war is war is war.

IMAGE: Chinese soldiers taken prisoner during the Korean War

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: Mulatto America

So the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones makes an argument about miscegenation in pop music and the lack of it in indie rock. Whatever you may think of it, it’s an argument and he makes it. Saying he’s “full of shit”—that’s not an argument. Saying he needs “to move beyond the framework of worldviews codified on the plantation”—that’s not an argument, either. Richard Crary, on the other hand, has some interesting things to say at The Existence Machine here, here, and here. Someone else not afraid to think about the issue and the history is Stephan Talty, whose book Mulatto America I reviewed a few years ago . . .

You can take your race-mixing with a dose of sex-tinged idealism, as does a friend of mine who remembers those “coffee-with-cream” days of the 1960s. “That’s how we were gonna save the world,” he chuckles.

Or you can take it with a wink and a nudge, like the white folks behind the satirical blackpeopleloveus.com, whose black friends have posted testimonials like: “Sally loves to touch my hair! She always asks me how I got my hair to do this. That makes me feel special. Like I have magical powers!”

Or you can arch your irony to the point that it bends back around and into a high-fashion runways-of-Milan sort of sincerity, best exemplified by the bored-looking white model in an expensive sweatshirt that proclaims: “L’hip hop c’est chic.”

Oui, oui, bro!

Whichever way you like it, it goes without saying that black (and brown) plus white equals Red, White and Blue. “Mulatto America” is how critic Stephan Talty describes it in his 2003 book of the same name. It’s a book that takes seriously Ralph Ellison’s lament that our nation’s success “has been bought at the cost of ignoring the processes through which we’ve arrived at any given moment in our national experience.”

For Talty, those processes include a few well-rehearsed moments, such as when an African slave confronts his master’s religion and discovers in its teachings the key to his own freedom. Talty reminds us that when the Rev. George Whitefield kicked off the Great Awakening in 1739, the converted hordes were both white and black, unashamed to worship together. By the time society’s instinctive segregation reasserted itself, the slaves had stolen their masters’ ultimate power and handed it over to Jesus.

Talty’s prose breezes along—he’s a journalist, not a scholar, and knows his way around a good anecdote. If at times he’s preoccupied with old news, he’s alert to new angles. “Black Christians were often persecuted from both sides,” Talty notes, “whipped by masters (Christians and atheists) who had bought them, as one put it, to serve him and not God; and mocked by their fellow slaves for following that ‘white man’s religion.’”

This would not be the last time blacks accused one another of selling out. If Elvis appropriated the sounds of the black church and juke joints, then Sam Cooke went the other way. His greatest hits—“You Send Me,” “Chain Gang”—owe nothing to the former gospel singer’s roots and everything to the almost silly optimism of black pop’s predecessor, doo-wop. It was a style, Talty wryly observes, in which, “for the first and last time in the history of black urban music, young black men competed to see how unworldly they could sound.”

Black critics often substitute “white” for “unworldly,” and they point the finger at ultra-smooth Marvin Gaye for confessing his appreciation for, of all people, Perry Como and Dean Martin. He must have been kidding, critics say, or else mocking. Because Marvin Gaye was so cool, and Perry Como was so . . . white.

But Talty speculates that Como and Dean were tapping into something that crooners like Gaye and Cooke coveted: “lack of drama, emotional nonchalance, a facility for illusion, freedom from worry, a hint of erotic control (in Dean Martin’s Lothario act, especially), and an easy confidence that things were going to be all right.”

The American dream, in other words. And, as Talty points out, “These were attitudes not readily found in the blues or gospel.”

Selling out wasn’t the point. Expanding what it means to be black—beyond the constraints of slavery, the church and poverty—was. If Aretha Franklin chose to record an album of show tunes, then black concert-goers should have been appreciative, rather than shouting at her, “Be your bad self!” and holding up signs that read, “Aretha, please come home.”

Her fans may have been right aesthetically, Talty writes. “But the mistake comes in seeing Franklin’s love of material that is not representative of the black tradition as being somehow a betrayal of her inner self. It was, to the contrary, an affirmation of it.”

Black people were not fighting to be white people, as some would have it, but to be, at least in the perception of others, just people, in all the complex and mixed-up ways that should suggest. Sam Cooke’s sordid death in 1964 says it all. Although married, he was involved with a mixed-race woman who later claimed he tried to rape her. He was found shot to death in a cheap motel, while his Ferrari was left running in the parking lot. On the seat, the police found an open bottle whiskey and a copy of Muhammed Speaks.

Talty is most convincing when writing about music. His sports knowledge is spotty—he is unable to identify Althea Gibson as a tennis player, for instance—and such factual mistakes are not rare enough. One hopes that his mention of a World War I-era migration of blacks from north to south rather than the other way around was simply a typo. His chapter on the ’70s, meanwhile, is unconvincing and awkward in its focus on stereotypes of black pimps.

The idea, though, for Mulatto America originated with his wonderful essay on Cooke, and Talty delights in finding ways to utter Ruth Brown and Hank Williams in the same breath. His riff on the origins of the Donna Summers disco classic “Love to Love You, Baby” is weirdly thrilling.

In the end, Talty’s focus makes sense. After all, music has been the premier American venue for race-mixing. While black and white athletes together display their talents on the playing field, black and white musicians actually exchange culture and experience, and in so doing brew up something new.

Of course, the most sublime example of this is jazz. Talty rightly sees the art form as the product of a thoroughly integrated New Orleans but emphasizes that the point is not that jazz is merely an amalgam of sources—blues, ragtime, classical, brass band—but “that the music is comfortable playing all these musics from the inside. The borrowings are not mocking or unsure but marked by total confidence.”

Like Ellison before him, Talty is arguing that there was not and is no white mainstream music to which blacks can sell out. That’s because they’ve always been on the inside, always within hearing distance, never intimidated by new sounds. “Indeed, what group of musicians has made more of the sound of the American experience?” Ellison famously asked.

And it’s true. But the point that Talty makes—a point not made nearly often enough, especially among black critics and musicians—is that the give and take went both ways. When white jazz geniuses such as Bix Beiderbecke  and Jack Teagarden came along, “they caused black artists and fans to suddenly see themselves in white people.”

Could the same be said about Eminem?

IMAGE: The Miscegenation Ball by Kimmel and Forster, 1864

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: Gangster We Are All Looking For

As novels go, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)—Le Thi Diem Thuy’s beautifully told account of a Vietnamese immigrant family—is soaking wet.

The sea is a constant, foreboding presence. Bodies are washing ashore on the first page and they are washing ashore on the last page. A man tells his beloved that if she would marry him, “he would pull the moon out of the sky and turn it into a pool for her to wash her feet in.” “Bad water” is blamed for the death of a young boy, and a simple glass from the tap is drunk “desperately, as though it were a reprieve.”

Such pervasive dampness is hardly an uncommon phenomenon in the literary fiction of Vietnam, which is a coastal nation, after all. One practically requires a raincoat to peruse the work of Duong Thu Huong, the country’s leading writer-dissident and water-conjurer. In Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), where all epiphanies come equipped with monsoons, the hero searches for freedom in “the sea of the sea,” only to end up drenched in a storm: “Rain, still rain. Water and more water, white sheets of it, as far as the eye could see.”

The Gangster We Are All Looking For goes a step further, telling us right at the start that in Vietnamese, “the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu’o’c."

The irony is that this novel, Thuy Le’s first, is not actually Vietnamese but American, retelling the oldest of American stories: that of immigrants desperately seeking assimilation. It features a dysfunctional family worthy of a Todd Solondz film, where the parents scream and fight (“like two dogs chasing each other’s tails”), the mother chops off her hair in a fit, and the daughter runs away to become a writer.

In Confucian Vietnam, the family is the gravity that keeps one anchored to the earth. In a California housing development called Linda Vista, on the other hand, a family portrait is secreted away up to the attic and left behind in the next move. A ringing phone is met with terror for the obligations that may wait on the other end.

Still, as this family stumbles through its stormy version of the American Dream, where everyone is an outsider trying to fit in, Vietnam lingers close by. It’s a connection not so much of blood, the narrator is fond of saying, as of water.

That narrator is the family’s young daughter, and while point of view is slippery here, the bulk of the book is presented through her eyes and ears. There's not much plot to speak of; think of this slim novel as a collection of images that gathers the rolling force of a long poem. The narrator is forever seeing the world as magical and sad: A butterfly encased in glass “pressed down on the paper the same way my Ba’s heavy head pressed down on the pillow at night, full of thoughts that dragged him into nightmares when all he wanted was a dream as sweet and happy as the taste of jackfruit ice cream.”

She inherits this worldview from her mother: “Ma says war is a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow.”

And her father, who tells her: “My family’s a garden full of dreamers lying on their backs, staring at the sky, drunk and choking on their dreams.”

It is this father, the title’s gangster, who is the brooding heartbeat of the book. His past is full of rumor and innuendo—maybe he was a gunrunner or a drug-dealer or a soldier. Whatever the case, he survives a Communist re-education camp, survives the boat trip to America, and survives America—for a while anyway. It’s a small kind of dignity: “His friends fell around him, first during the war and then after the war, but somehow he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life.”

Credit Thuy Le, that for all the writerly self-consciousness her prose periodically succumbs to, readers can be left with a character as memorably haunting as Ba. By novel’s end, waterlogged and image-soaked, you won’t have found him. But it will hardly have mattered.

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: The Whore’s Child

Richard Russo, once a teacher of writing himself, opens his 2002 collection of short stories, The Whore’s Child, in familiar territory: the classroom. Sister Ursula, who is “nearly as big as a linebacker,” deposits herself in the narrator’s advanced writing workshop, uninvited and unregistered. Despite the professor’s insistence that she write fiction—“In this class we actually prefer a well-told lie,” he tells her—she submits for the class’s consideration several hefty installments of rock-pure memoir.

She patted my hand, as you might the hand of a child. “Never you mind,” she then assured me, adjusting her wimple for the journey home. “My whole life has been a lie.”

“I’m sure you don’t mean that,” I told her.

But of course she did. Sister Ursula is constitutionally incapable of writing what is not true. On the other hand, she is equally incapable of seeing clearly what she writes—and this is what provides Russo’s story, if not the nun’s, the thrum of good fiction.

In a post-modern and un-Russo-like twist, “The Whore’s Child” is both the perfect short story and the blueprint for such a story. As the professor summarizes Sister Ursula’s bitter and lonely tale (he provides only her knife-edged first lines, like “It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the Church”), we also hear the class’s response. It is in this unlikely arena, marked by PC angst and academic jargon, that Sister Ursula discovers a secret she has been hiding from herself her entire life.

Sister Ursula, we come to understand, is the ideal practitioner of the “well-told lie.”

Russo’s regular beat, it should be said, is men, not nuns, sons, not sisters. Through five fat, summer-perfect novels, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, the author has explored, with wonderful humor and pathos, that great American, impotent male. From the down-and-out Sully in Nobody’s Fool to the hapless but good-hearted Miles in Empire Falls, Russo’s protagonists are mere skeletons of the 1950s ideal they were weaned on. Where their fathers lived in an age of straightforward, powerful men, they have reached middle age in a time of ironic self-contempt.

Just ask Hank, who at the beginning of “The Farther You Go” is suffering from a deep, throbbing pain emanating from the center of his being, the result of recent prostate surgery. “There are those who think that a man’s phallus is the center of his being,” he muses, “but I have not been among them until now.” The story that follows lodges Hank square in the eye of his daughter’s domestic squabble. Before it’s over, he’s forced into the uncomfortable position of giving his son-in-law Russell, guilty of domestic abuse and kicked out of the house, a ride to the airport.

Could it be that Hank actually sympathizes with the kid? At least to the extent that he sympathizes with Russell’s total inability to connect with this woman: “That I am a man has somehow escaped her,” mourns Hank, referring to his daughter, “which is why she doesn’t think twice about bending over in front of me in her peasant blouse. And maybe it’s even worse than that. If she has never thought of her father as a man, can she imagine herself as a woman?”

Then there is Martin, poor, pathetic Martin of “Monhegan Light.” On the ferry to an artist’s colony off the coast of Maine, Martin whines about his dead wife’s sister: “Of all the things that Joyce’s sort of woman said about men, Martin disliked the he-just-doesn’t-get-it riff most of all. For one thing it presupposed there was something to get, usually something obvious, something you’d have to be blind not to see.”

It isn’t until Martin discovers a series of nude paintings of his wife, done by her lover, that he finally opens his eyes and gets it.

Russo doesn’t approach his interest in men and their “poor, maligned appendage(s)” with the drum-beating fervor of, say, Robert Bly. Instead, his stories participate in a kind of elegy. The Eisenhower era of liberal-arts educated, war-hewn men in suits is lost, and with it has gone any model for how we men should conduct ourselves.

In “Joy Ride,” a young boy is whisked west by his mother, who is determined to leave her husband and raise some hell. After days of traveling on the interstate, he finds himself on the dance floor, wedged between two men battling over the honor of his mother: a frighteningly obese man who regularly devours record amounts of steak as a promotional trick for a barbecue joint and a rascally come-on artist who doesn’t take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, at home, sits his trickster dad, who at heart seems to have wanted only the best for him and his mom.

Sometimes the characters here are almost too familiar: Hank from “The Farther You Go,” for instance, bears more than a passing resemblance to a stopped-up professor in the novel Straight Man. But Russo spins his tales in prose that is as straightforward as the kind of world his characters long for, full of the crisp and elliptical dialogue he is rightly famous for.

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: Breakfast on Pluto

One ought to meet Patrick “Pussy” Braden, the dress-wearing, trick-turning narrator of Patrick McCabe’s 1997 novel, Breakfast on Pluto, if only for the experience. He begins his story—ostensibly told to his psychiatrist Terence, a.k.a. “Dr. Essence Of Insight”—at Christmas time, with his mustachioed foster mother screaming, “Stop tearing the arse out of that turkey!” and Pussy proudly awarding himself and his kin the “ALL-IRELAND FUNCTIONAL FAMILY OF THE CENTURY AWARD! So congratulations, Hairy Ma and all your little out-of-wedlock kids!”

Of course, at this point, things are only getting started. It is the early ’70s—the height of the so-called “Troubles” and IRA violence—and Pussy lives in the small, Irish town of Tyreelin, situated precariously on the border between north and south. He is not-unreasonably obsessed with his father, Father Bernard, and writes endless school essays (with titles like “Father Bernard Rides Again”) about the rape of his real mother—whom he likens to screen-actress Mitzi Gaynor. Eventually, Pussy actually begins to dress like Mitzi Gaynor (part of some strange search for his mother?) and takes on with a prominent politician, who is promptly murdered. It’s off to London now, where he shops for “crushed velvet purple loon pants” by day and, by night, works a corner at Piccadilly Circus. He takes on all variety of lovers—some male, some female, some harmless, some psychopathic, one called Brendan Huggy Bear. He stalks his father.

Pussy makes it back to Tyreelin—barely—but not before finding one of his best friends, Irwin, “eliminated” by the IRA and then himself, innocent Puss, trapped in the middle of a Republican bombing campaign. Chapter titles reveal the narrator’s ever-questionable state of mind: “Busy Men Prepare to Blow Up London and Get Pussy into Trouble”; “Ooh, Bomber!”; and “It’s Bombing Night and I Haven’t Got a Thing to Wear.”

Now, aside from acknowledging the fact that Patrick “Pussy” Braden is a literary companion in the way that methamphetamines are a quiet way to spend an evening, it seems only fair to ask: What does all this add up to? It was the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney who warned his Irish compatriots, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing.” And, unfortunately, McCabe seems to have taken him at his word. For sure, Breakfast on Pluto—shortlisted for the Booker Prize and McCabe’s fifth novel—is a linguistic tour de force. Few writers on the planet can deliver a monologue as elaborate, shocking, funny and pitch-black as McCabe. He proved that with The Butcher Boy, whose narrator, the indomitable Francie Brady, was just as windy, hell-bent and optimistic as Pussy could ever be. But behind all the words there has to be some insight. There are desperate moments—such as when Pussy hears that his politician boyfriend’s head and shoulders were found in the river—when all the reader gets are lines like, “Well, excuse me, darlings, while I wet myself.”

Partly what is at work, of course, is the disconnect between the comforting, upbeat world inside Pussy’s head and the surrounding madness and mayhem. The title, also the name of a chart hit for Don Partridge in 1969 [Mp3], is meant to suggest that Pussy’s disconnect is so large he might as well be having breakfast on Pluto. But that’s interesting only up to a point. After all, most people need to separate themselves in one way or another from modern life in order to survive—hence our obsession with the television and the movies. The Butcher Boy (which was brilliantly adapted to film by Ireland’s acclaimed director Neil Jordan) introduced Francie’s madness more slyly and then forced his hallucinatory existence slowly, inevitably into a tragic collision with reality. Breakfast on Pluto fails to achieve such denouement. Instead, Pussy inexplicably fades in and out, periodically dropping the glam-rock and sarcasm for moments of straight-ahead, heartbreaking observation (moments which temptingly suggest a building clarity), only to regress soon after into the absurd. (In 2005, Jordan set Breakfast on Pluto to screen, as well. I haven’t seen it yet . . .)

Nothing is as it seems, that much is clear—not when barroom oglers lift up Pussy’s skirt, not when Irwin denies his serious involvement with the IRA, not even when the bomb explodes in London. As Puss narrates, tellingly, in the third person: “If anyone had been observing Puss, they would surely have said: ‘Why is she laughing, for heaven’s sake? Doesn’t she realize she ought to be dead?’” In the end, this is what Breakfast on Pluto reads like: an uncomfortable, inappropriate, funereal chuckle.

When, amidst the rubble, the truth of his situation finally dawns on him, though, Puss only remarks: “I must be practically beside the point of detonation and my tights are in ribbons. I must get a new pair! I really must!”

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: The Boys' Crusade

In The Boys’ Crusade (2003), Paul Fussell recalls the Children’s Crusade, the famed 13th-century expedition on which 50,000 young people may or may not have marched into the Holy Land in an attempt to free it of Islam. It was an adventure that strikes modern sensibilities as nothing if not appalling.

He then points to Eisenhower’s unironic invocation of the term “crusade” 700 years later, on the eve of D-Day. It was an invasion that would cost 135,000 American boys their lives—boys, Fussell points out, who were mostly still teenagers.

“I mean no disrespect to the memory of Dwight D. Eisenhower by examining his term crusade,” Fussell writes. “It made some sense at the moment, even if many of the still unbloodied troops were likely to ridicule it. If they read or heard the Supreme Commander’s words at all, they were doubtless embarrassed to have so highfalutin a term applied to their forthcoming performances and their feelings about them.”

What the troops understood beforehand and what Eisenhower saw fit to forget even in retrospect (the title of his war memoir was Crusade in Europe) forms the bulk of Fussell’s short book: a litany of the horrors of war experienced by and sometimes perpetrated by our boys in Europe.

There is mention, for instance, of the extensive Allied bombing of Pas de Calais in 1944 to further the ruse that this would be the D-Day landing spot. “Even the Germans found it hard to believe that their enemy would kill so many civilians merely to maintain a deception,” Fussell notes.

There is a revealing examination of American soldiers’ attitudes toward the French and vice versa, as well as an acknowledgment of just how much better supplied GIs were next to the Brits (compare 22.5 sheets of toilet paper per day for the former to just three for the latter)—a fact that resulted for the Americans in better hygiene and lots more sex with British girls.

There are many instances of gross incompetence—incompetence that, for Fussell, was the rule and not the exception—leading to countless military and civilian casualties alike. In one memorable chapter, ironically titled “One Small-Unit Action,” Fussell narrates a platoon’s doomed frontal assault on a superior German position. The order to attack may have been unintentionally precipitated by the platoon’s lieutenant, who, in an argument with his superior, corrected the use of the word “revelant.” The lieutenant was subsequently shot through the neck, and several soldiers were forced to play dead for 12 hours before being rescued.

Fussell lets us see how talk of medals are used immediately afterward to cover up cowardice and ineptitude, and then how the unit’s official history boils the horrifying encounter down to a “fracas,” and a victorious one at that.

Fussell writes with characteristic anger, humanity and furious insight. His knowledge is wide-ranging—he is by trade an English professor and has as much to say about poetry as he does about war—but his voice thankfully lacks the somber, this-is-good-for-you quality of Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know About War.

Still, The Boys’ Crusade feels undercooked: too arbitrary in its choice of vignettes, too vague in its arguments. It’s tough to figure if it’s too short or, even at fewer than 200 pages, too long.

What redeems it in the end is its willingness to wonder about the complications of its title. In his chapter “The Camps,” Fussell shows how the Holocaust provided, nearly after the fact, a viscerally powerful moral justification for the war’s slaughter. On the other hand, discovery of the death camps also brought to the surface our own darkest impulses: “I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed,” declared one American lieutenant at Dachau. “How can they expect to do what they have done and simply say ‘I quit,’ and go scot free? They are not fit to live.”

IMAGE: American GIs somewhere in the English Channel on the eve of D-Day, June 1944

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: Breakfast Served Any Time

Donald Hall is like a cantankerous old cow chewing on its cud. To avoid any misunderstandings, let me emphasize that this is a highly poetic cow, and the cud is, of course, language. When he writes, in his wonderful 2004 collection of essays on poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, that poetry is all about the “mouth-pleasure, the muscle-pleasure,” you can't help but imagine his jaw turning over and over.

“Anybody knows that the word food fills no bellies,” Hall says, “but the word food is for chewing on all the same: ef that sets lip to tooth, ou that rounds the lips as if for kissing, deh that smacks tongue onto mouth-top. The word carries no calories but in a receptive mouth the juices flow.”

Poetry, in other words, is not sound, but the making of sound. It’s not love; it’s sex. (And writing is like orgasm, moans the almost-79-year-old Hall at one point—only it takes longer.)

This is a refreshing if not a revolutionary place to start, but it forces the New Hampshire poet into pasture with the lazy and the anti-intellectual, with folks like Felix Dennis, the British moneybags behind the lad mag Maxim. Back in 2004, The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page that Dennis, author of A Glass Half Full, had launched a “crusade to challenge the obscurity of modern poetry, by reclaiming old-fashioned values of rhyme and meter.” And what fights obscurity better than 1) a reading tour featuring young women in tight T-shirts tempting attendees with free wine; and 2) poems about dogs?

The incompetence of Dennis’ verse can hardly be overstated, but one or two of the aesthetic principles behind it might actually find a home on Hall’s farm. On page 1 of Breakfast he defends the specific ecstasies of “Baa, baa, black sheep” (dullards force ideas onto poems, Hall says, while the rest of us “chew on them, taste them, and dance to them”), and later he observes, with characteristic impatience, that we “still encounter among some Americans, of less than acute intelligence, the notion that it is politically reactionary to write in meter.”

Hall’s got something to say about modern poetry, too. In an essay on Maine poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, he rails against his idol’s mistreatment at the hands of critics: “If we are old enough, we grew up learning that modern poetry has to be difficult; therefore, ‘Mr. Flood’s Party’ cannot be modern poetry, or maybe (by idiotic extension) poetry at all.”

E. E. Cummings is partly to blame on this point. Innovative poetry needn’t be flashy or funny-looking, Hall grumbles: “If we take a cliché—‘basic assumption,’ for example, or ‘Yankees clash with archrival Red Sox,’ or ‘mud wonderful’—and print it in red ink on blue paper in Germanic script with perfume on it and project it from four projectors on four walls at once, with four people speaking it at four levels of pitch and volume—we still use a cliché; as well, we may have a nice party going.”

“It is possible,” Hall admits much later, “that I am a crank about dead metaphors.” This is code for, “Don’t get me started about phrases like ‘a glass half full.’” On the other hand, if you do get him started, you’ll be left a better, more alert reader and writer.

There’s a recurring tension in Breakfast Served Any Time All Day between Donald Hall the democrat—who continually reassures us that we needn't be professionals to handle poetry—and Donald Hall the scold. I much prefer the latter, even though it’s me he’s yelling about when he explodes, “Abolish the M.F.A.!” When he’s angry he’s more fun, less of a showoff (too many of those chewy, tasty, rhythmic sentences get in the way), and more relevant.

Case in point: Hall complains that “contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition—modesty, alas, well earned.”

Now here’s something to chew on.

In his estimation, too many poets are writing too damn many poems. To pluck a Hallsian phrase out of another context: “Piss on that.”

“I see no reason to spend your life writing poems,” he says, “unless your goal is to write great poems.”

He recalls Horace’s advice that young poets keep their poems to themselves for 10 years. Do this not out of modesty, Hall says, but out of respect for revision. (“Revision moves me from the raw, formless suffering of the poem’s impetus to the expressed suffering of the poem.” In other words, the pain resides in the first draft, the poem in the revision.) Pope cut those 10 years down to five. “By this time, I would be grateful—and published poetry would be better—if people kept their poems home for eighteen months,” Hall sighs. “Poems have become as instant as coffee or onion soup mix.”

Meanwhile, there are always blowhards among us announcing the death of poetry. “Poets love to parade as victims; we love the romance of alienation and insult,” Hall argues. But what they ought to do is get down to the dirty business of writing and reading well. For this purpose, one could hardly recommend a more exhilarating book than Breakfast Served Any Time All Day.

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Recommendation: The Silent Woman

“At a time when instruments for recording and disseminating information about people’s intimate behavior are cheap and easy to use, and when newspapers and magazines and television programs and Web sites purvey that kind of information without restraint, and when even ordinary people apparently can’t do enough to tell the world everything about themselves, a defense of the professional biographer’s right to pry does not seem something that civilization stands in dire need of,” begins Louis Menand in a recent New Yorker essay.

Odd then, that he devotes pages to providing one. And odd, too, that he does not mention that a brilliant defense—or if not defense, then consideration—has long been submitted, and by a New Yorker staff writer to boot: The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm.

To be sure, I could give two shits about Plath and Hughes. I’ve never read The Bell Jar, although I’ve heard it’s quite good. My interest here is in Malcolm, the way she insinuates herself into one of the great battles of modern literature, taking as her subject not so much Plath or Hughes or even Plath & Hughes, but their memories, the way they are written about and fiercely argued about.

Poets—like politicians or jazz musicians—have partisans. And while such folks allow themselves to have a personal investment in the writer, an opinion that is not entirely subject to reason, the biographer should not. Or at least that it is the prevailing assumption that Malcolm pokes and prods.

If a biographer doesn’t intend to be favorable, then at least she ought to be cold and omnipotent. To behave differently would, according to Malcolm (who writes with an approving wink), cast doubt on the whole enterprise.

“As a burglar should not pause to discuss with his accomplice the rights and wrongs of burglary while jimmying the lock,” Malcolm argues, “so a biographer ought not to introduce doubts about the legitimacy of the biographical enterprise. The biography—loving public does not want to hear that biography is a flawed genre. It prefers to believe that certain biographers are bad guys.”

I love Malcolm for the way she confronts such awkward truths, and in this and in other of her books, she pays the price for her trouble.

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.