My review of William T. Vollmann’s Imperial on PopMatters

PopMatters has published my review of Imperial by William T. Vollmann.

My review of Calvo’s Wonderful World in The Quarterly Conversation

My review of the Spanish writer Javier Calvo’s novel Wonderful World appears in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

Why Stephen Elliott writes

I’m a big fan of Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby, and I’m very much looking forward to picking up his new book, The Adderall Diaries, soon. Of late he’s also been editing The Rumpus, which has very quickly become one of the best literature and culture sites around. A couple weeks ago, he published a very fine essay of his own there: “Why I Write,” in which he addresses the question with straightforward and sincere eloquence.

The (nonprofit) future of news

Michael Massing has a terrific piece on the future of news in the New York Review of Books. (Thanks to Scott Esposito for pointing this one out).

The news business is in serious trouble these days, but Massing’s take is more optimistic than most. The reason? He (correctly, I think) identifies nonprofit business models (such as that of the Twin Cities’ own MinnPost) as the industry’s best hope going forward. Massing (a contributing editor for the Columbia Journalism Review) also talks about the phenomenal continued success of NPR, and points out the wisdom of their recent efforts to ramp up the depth and quality of their original local reporting.

Ambulance-chasing essays

As for popular culture, the essayist’s chronic invocation of its latest bandwagon fads, however satirically framed, comes off frequently as a pandering to the audience’s short attention span—a kind of literary ambulance chasing….There is something so depressing about this desperate mining of things in the air, such a fevered search for a generational Zeitgeist, such an unctuously smarmy tone of ‘we,’ which assumes that everyone shares the same consumerist-boutique sensibility….

That’s Philip Lopate, writing not about the depthless and ephemeral snark of so much of the writing on the web, but instead about “life-style” pieces in the pages of the periodicals of the 1980s. But I think it applies just as well to the blogosphere and the net in general, and it’s as good of a statement as any of the kind of writing that I try to avoid indulging in here. Here’s what Lopate (in “What Happened to the Personal Essay?”, from his 1989 collection Against Joie de Vivre) calls for instead:

One longs for any evidence of a distinct human voice—anything but this ubiquitous Everyman/woman pizzazzy drone.

Lopate (who has a new book on Susan Sontag, about which he was recently interviewed over at the Millions) does, indeed, write with “a distinct human voice” in his essays—he’s smart and funny without going for cheap shots or condescending, and has a real knack for spinning fairly inane subjects (such as shaving a beard or arguing with his landlord) into thoughtful and lively explorations of human behavior. He has a distinctly confessional impulse—the kind of thing that ordinarily bugs me in essays, and which has led me to keep a safe distance from the personal essay (and an even greater one from the memoir) in the past. But Lopate’s winning sense of humor makes the fact that he writes endlessly about himself more tolerable—as does his remarkable honesty, and his capacity for gentle self-mockery. And though he has a penchant for being cranky and contrary, there’s also always a very human warmth bubbling up from underneath—or, in some cases, right up at the surface, as in his wonderful essay “Chekhov for Children” (in the same collection), which made me want to stand up and cheer.

Recently I’ve been giving the personal essay a second chance, and (much to my surprise) I’ve been falling for the form headlong. As the whole genre is in some respects new to me (or at least seems like new to me again right now), I’ll probably be posting on essayists here a great deal in the relatively near future. If you have any recommendations or favorites, I’d be glad to hear about them.

Summer book reviews

My recent return to full time work has made it more difficult for me to continue to update this blog regularly. (For the past several months, I’ve been dedicating all of my writing time to working on material intended for publication elsewhere.) But, I’ve missed posting here terribly, and I intend to get back to it soon. In the meantime, here’s a list of the book reviews I’ve published since the last time I made a post. Check back soon for links to my reviews forthcoming in Identity Theory, ForeWord, PopMatters and other publications.

• Review of Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson. Identity Theory, August 3, 2009.
• Review of Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music by Amiri Baraka. ForeWord, July/August 2009.
• Review of Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda. Rain Taxi, Summer 2009 (#54). Reprinted by Powell’s Books, July 20, 2009.
• Review of Ghosts by César Aira. Rain Taxi, Summer 2009 (#54).
• Review of The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Özdamar. ForeWord, May/June 2009.

The Informant: high crimes in my hometown

I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, the one-time “Soybean Capital of the World,” home to almost eighty thousand people and also to ADM, one of the world’s most powerful (and least-known) multinational corporations. In central Illinois, ADM transforms the bountiful harvest of some of the world’s best farmland into artificial sweeteners, ethanol and biofeuls, food additives, industrial chemicals, and animal feed (among many other products). During the long reign of chairman and CEO Dwayne Andreas, ADM grew from a small grain company into an international agribusiness behemoth, and also came to wield tremendous political influence. Andreas was close friends with former vice president Hubert Humphrey, and in 1972 Andreas donated $100,000 to the liberal Democrat’s political campaign—the same year in which he gave President Richard Nixon $25,000 that would be used to finance the Watergate break-in. I can also remember seeing local news coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev stepping out onto the tarmac at the tiny Decatur airport—he’d come to my hometown to do business with Andreas.

For many years, ADM has reaped great profits by means of its tremendous political influence. Two of the company’s biggest businesses—ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup—would not be nearly so profitable (and perhaps not profitable at all) if it weren’t for massive government subsidies that have poured billions of dollars directly into ADM’s coffers. (For an outline of the basics of this story, see this Cato Institute report from 1995. You’ll also find insightful discussion of the politics of high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol, and of big agribusiness in general, in Michael Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

But for all its power, ADM could not prevent itself from getting hit with a $100 million fine for its participation in a price fixing conspiracy in the markets for citric acid and lysine (a biological product that promotes growth in livestock). In the early nineties, ADM executives met regularly with their Japanese, Korean, and European counterparts in order to reach agreements on prices and production volumes in lysine, and held similar meetings with producers of citric acid. Such agreements are blatantly illegal under antitrust law, because they permit companies to charge artificially high prices for their products. By fixing prices, ADM and its co-conspirators were effectively stealing many millions of dollars from their own customers.

Corporate price-fixing is normally extremely difficult to prove, but in this case, FBI agents were able to present prosecutors with hundreds of hours of price-fixing meetings secretly taped by an ADM executive named Mark Whitacre. In his absorbing and thorough 2000 book The Informant, the New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald tells the complex, bizarre, and utterly fascinating story of how Whitacre worked with the FBI for years, while also lying outrageously in order to cover up his own embezzlement of several million dollars. Part thriller, part character portrait, The Informant makes for thoroughly absorbing reading, and Eichenwald does a masterful job of drawing on interviews, tape transcripts, and other sources in order to place readers right in the thick of the FBI’s investigation into ADM.

It’s not the only book about the price fixing scandal; James B. Lieber’s Rats in the Grain also provides a well-written and incisive account. But Eichenwald’s book tells the story more thoroughly and in much greater detail, while at the same time often reading like a suspense novel—which is no doubt part of why Steven Soderbergh has recently made a film based on the book, starring Matt Damon, which will be released in theaters this fall. I’m eager to see it, and not only because I think The Informant will translate very well to cinematic adaptation. Soderbergh shot the movie in Decatur, and apparently took great care to ensure that the film’s production design is true to Central Illinois in the early 1990s. I’m looking forward to the experience of seeing the world of my own adolescence on the big screen.

But in the meantime: I’d highly recommend Eichenwald’s book.

My new review on PopMatters: Potato by John Reader

PopMatters has published my review of the journalist John Reader’s history of the potato, titled (surprisingly enough) Potato. If you’re going to read just one history of the potato, this probably shouldn’t be it.

“The beard makes the bard”: Poets ranked by beard weight

Via The Second Pass: at A Journey Round My Skull, Gilbert Alter-Gilbert offers “commentary” on The Language of the Beard, which he alleges to be a forgotten tome penned by “one Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881 – 1937)…a deipnosophist, clubman, and literary miscellanist with a special interest in tonsorial subjects.” I suspect this book does not actually exist—but this post is wonderful all the same. It’s had me smiling wide all evening.

Excerpted from the post:

There is a direct correlation between personal appearance and artistic proficiency and integrity, or what, in the case of the bewhiskered brethren of the literary fraternity, he elsewhere calls “poetic gravity” or beard weight. It might be said, in short, that Underwood’s motto is the beard makes the bard.

The post includes evaluations of a number of poets by the weight of their beards, as well as classifications of their beards by type (“Italian False Goatee,” “Queen’s Brigade,” “Garibaldi Elongated,” “Claus-esque”). On Underwood’s scale, Walt Whitman scores a relatively paltry 22—well behind William Cullen Bryant (43), whose “Van Winkle” style beard is impressively full, but whose poetry doesn’t quite measure up to Whitman’s in my book. Perhaps Underwood’s scale needs a little tweaking. But then again, what do I know? My own beard most likely wouldn’t even outweigh that of Sir Walter Raleigh.

My review of Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée in Rain Taxi

Rain Taxi has published my review of Amélie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancée as a part of its Spring 2009 Online Edition.

My review of Amina Cain’s I Go To Some Hollow on PopMatters

PopMatters is now running my review of Amina Cain’s I Go To Some Hollow, a collection of unconventional and fleetingly lyrical short stories.

I Go To Some Hollow

My review of Roche’s Wetlands on PopMatters

My review of Charlotte Roche’s controversial novel Wetlands has been posted on PopMatters.

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

My review of two new books by J. Robert Lennon on PopMatters

New on PopMatters today: my dual review of Pieces for the Left Hand and Castle by J. Robert Lennon, out simultaneously from Graywolf.

Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand

A side note: I also recently read an earlier novel of Lennon’s called The Funnies, which I’d thoroughly recommend. It’s a bittersweet family comedy about a young artist coming to terms with the fact that his true talent isn’t for avant-garde sculpture, but instead for following his father’s trade in the daily comic strip business. When his father dies, he inherits his strip—which bears an unmistakable resemblance to The Family Circus—on the condition that he demonstrate to the people of the syndicate that he’s capable of handling it. This proves to be a much more difficult task than the protagonist expects, and Lennon treats his struggles with empathy, humor, and a fascinating attention to detail about the art of drawing and writing for the funny pages. I think it’s Lennon’s best novel, and it’s well worth seeking out.

Lennon's Castle

New review in The Quarterly Conversation

The Quarterly Conversation has just posted my review of the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Me and Kaminski.

Unjustly overlooked Novel About My Wife

Emily Perkins’s Novel About My Wife recently won this year’s Believer Book Award, but has otherwise gone almost entirely unnoticed in the United States. I’m extremely glad that the folks at The Believer have now brought the book to my attention: Perkins has written a flat-out terrific novel, and I hope that the receipt of the prize will win her many more new readers.

Novel About My Wife is narrated by Tom, a Londoner and the father of a young child, in the aftermath of his wife’s death. As he looks back on the final months of their life together, Tom struggles to come to an understanding about what happened to Ann, and attempts to put himself in her head during the course of the events leading up to her death. I won’t go into the details of the plot, as I have no desire to spoil the novel’s spooky and emotionally fraught suspense for anyone. Suffice it to say that it’s an unusually involving book, and that I felt compelled to rush through the whole of it in under twenty-four hours.

Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Perkins’s novel is masterfully plotted, and she also does a fully convincing job of bringing Tom’s first-person voice to life on the page. More impressive still is the way she employs artful and often beautiful prose in order to capture all the subtleties of pitch and intensity in Tom’s emotional state as his life with Ann begins to unravel. The passage quoted below not only offers a lovely and well-observed peek into the everyday intimacy experienced by Tom and Ann, but also demonstrates the power of his love for her. In context—because we know that Ann will die, and Tom will never get to enjoy this kind of moment again—the scene is also shot through the desperation, fear, sadness, and grief. Perkins writes:

‘Oh, God, I’m so old to have a baby,’ Ann moaned from the bathroom in that half talking to herself, half talking to me voice that married people use….I loved that voice, I loved hearing Ann’s inner thoughts as they rose gently to the surface, a ribbon of intimate words floating out of her mouth on the bathroom steam and through the door to me, where I opportunistically sat, ostensibly waiting to clean my teeth but really living for that moment.

It’s a gorgeous passage, and only one of many in Perkins’s engrossing and moving novel.

Salon Interview with Charlotte Roche

Over at Salon, Nina Powers interviews the German writer Charlotte Roche, whose first novel Wetlands stirred up a lot of controversy in Europe because of its extreme sexual and scatological frankness. My review of the book (which comes out in the United States on April 8 ) will run on PopMatters soon, so I won’t comment on it in any detail here. But, I think Powers does an excellent job with the interview, and gets to the heart of why the book has made so many people uncomfortable. These days it’s very difficult to shock anyone with explicit content alone; instead, Roche’s real provocation lies in insisting that readers who feel shocked or disgusted by her explicit discussion of her heroine’s bodily functions ought to carefully examine the nature of their responses.

Here’s Roche in the interview:

Very often, lately, people have come up to me and say “You look tired,” and I hate it. Women are supposed to always look fit and healthy and pretty. But everything that is sick and tired is all very human—and I think that being human is a big taboo.

My Essay on All About My Mother on PopMatters

PopMatters celebrates its 10th anniversary this week with a sprawling multi-part feature on 62 of the most memorable films of 1999. I happily seized the opportunity to write about Almodóvar’s All About My Mother for the site, and you can read the resulting essay here (though you have to scroll down past the piece on Bringing Out the Dead to see it).

Kafka International Airport

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

Garage rock glory

Back in my college days, I played in two bands (or three, if you count the Velvet Underbelly, a one-off Velvet Underground cover band for a party). The first, This Many Boyfriends Club, started performing in public before most of us knew how to play our instruments. We wrote punks songs about Dungeons & Dragons (“Player’s Handbook”) and Amy Fisher, and covered tunes by bands like the Vaselines. At our first big gig, I broke strings on three different guitars, including one belonging to the headlining act. At our second gig, we decided to take a band picture in front of a brick wall in the alley—but it was a chilly night, and we didn’t realize until a couple of songs into the set that our guitars and bass had become badly detuned out in the cold air. The second band, called the Love Bees, set out with the explicit intention of being a garage rock band—we’d all been listening to Rhino’s fantastic Nuggets boxed set, and as a result we’d fallen in love with bands like the Seeds, the Sonics, and the Electric Prunes. Somewhere along the way we lost sight of our original intentions and got a bit more ambitious—which probably wasn’t the best idea, really, since most of us still weren’t proficient at playing our instruments.

More recently we’ve joked that if the Love Bees ever reform, we’ll probably be a free jazz act, given how our musical interests have evolved in the years since. That said, there’s no doubt at all that garage rock spirit resides inside me still—and it’s that part of me that’s head-over-heels right now for Fuckbook, the new garage rock covers album from Yo La Tengo. Officially, the name of the band this time out is “Condo Fucks”—a reference to the hilarious fake album advertisements in the liner notes of YLT’s 1997 record I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. The album title is also a play on the name of an earlier YLT covers album, Fakebook.

Yo La Tengo has always been a great covers band—their fuzzed-out take on the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” is a pure pleasure, and their version of “I Wanna Be Your Lover” for the I’m Not There soundtrack offers an uncanny impersonation of the sound of a mid-60s Dylan record. On Fuckbook, they’re out to have a blast—it’s a record that perfectly captures the rough-edged glory of good old-fashioned garage rock.

For a veteran band like Yo La Tengo, the point of going garage lies in recapturing the same spirit of naive enthusiasm felt by three or four kids pounding out barely-recognizable versions of “Satisfaction” while their parents plug their ears and roll their eyes. It’s about feeling the uncomplicated, unsophisticated, and absolutely sincere love of rock and roll that even the most jaded and sophisticated contemporary indie rockers must have at once point felt themselves. And it’s a type of music that’s especially close to my heart, as it’s exactly the kind of album that the Love Bees would have loved to have made—if we’d had the slightest idea of what we were doing, that is, or if we’d been able to play in any key other than C, D, or G.

Fuckbook by Condo Fucks

Of course, part of the pleasure of Fuckbook also lies in the fact that Yo La Tengo are not, in fact, a garage band: the false start on “So Easy Baby” is fully intentional, as are the amusing count-ins (including one going down from 9 to 2) on several different tracks. Also, sometimes Ira really lets loose, unleashing some finely-calibrated noise that would be far out of reach for a garage guitarist who only has three chords and the truth to rely on.

But, best not to think about any of that too much—Fuckbook isn’t an album that requires analysis. Instead, you just need to remember the love for rock and roll in your heart, put the record on, and turn it up to eleven.

PS: Congratulations to former Love Bee and This Many Boyfriends Club singer/guitarist/trumpeter Jim Gill and his wife Becky on the birth of James Stanley Gill yesterday. And actually, make that Dr. Jim Gill: congratulations on your successful defense, as well.

Canonized alive

When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, she was 62 years old—no spring chicken, but still a writer with a long career ahead of her. After receiving the Nobel, Morrison experienced literary deification, and in the sixteen long years since, she has been routinely accorded the same kind of reverence ordinarily reserved for long-dead writers whose canonical position is beyond dispute. Most critical discussion of her fiction now takes an assumption of greatness as its starting point. When a new Toni Morrison novel arrives, the question for reviewers and scholars is never, “Is it good?”—its quality is a given. Rather, the task is to fit the new work into the context of Morrison’s previous accomplishments and of great literature more broadly. Morrison, in short, has been canonized alive.

Given this fact, Morrison no doubt makes a tempting target for critics in search of an exalted literary reputation to deflate—the harder they come, the harder they fall. But actual attempts at Morrison takedowns are quite rare. The reason? Part of it might be her status as a beloved living legend within American literature. More fundamentally, though, I think it’s simply that her books are fully worthy of the extraordinary acclaim they’ve received. Also, despite having completed an apotheosis at such an early age, Morrison has never rested on her laurels. Her new novel, A Mercy, published late in 2008, is yet another worthy entry to an astoundingly rich body of work.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

In the novel, Morrison interweaves the stories and voices of several characters—a slave girl; an Anglo-Dutch trader; his wife; and their orphaned Native American servant, among others—who are attempting to forge lives for themselves in the New World in the 1680s. At 167 pages, the novel is slim and dense, finding room for several involving storylines while also making nuanced, intelligent, and morally powerful arguments about the nature of freedom and bondage, the formation of the American character, and the American relationship to the land. All the while, Morrison’s language is intoxicating in its sounds and rhythms, routinely achieving beautifully poetic effects without sacrificing story or sense.

Here’s one brief illustrative passage, in which Jakob, the trader, ponders making a move to Barbados in the hope of achieving greater fortune and success:

Right, he thought, looking at a sky vulgar with stars. The silver that glittered there was not at all unreachable. And that wide swath of cream pouring through the stars was his for the tasting.

What I love about this passage is not only its surface gorgeousness, but also the ways in which Morrison uses it to breathe new life into an old, overfamiliar metaphor. This is far from the first time that the stars have been used as a metaphor for hope; the conceit is so familiar that it found its way into Disney movies generations ago, and even then it was far from fresh. But here Morrison does something remarkable: the stars become “cream” for “the tasting,” and Jakob’s hope becomes an embodied hunger, rather than an abstract gaze heavenward. This idea forges a connection with the metaphor’s ancient heart, reconnecting the dots between the hungry, restless, unsettled feeling in Jakob’s gut and the milky splash of stars above. At the same time, Morrison quietly achieves some distance from Jakob’s perspective, noting the vulgarity of the stars, and thus calling into question both the ethics of his hopes and the fact that he has no real reason to believe that he might succeed. And so Morrison also uncovers another aspect of the metaphor that contemporary readers rarely give any thought: the idea of the heavens as existing on an altogether different scale than human hopes, and the idea that the stars reveal just how small a man who wishes upon them can be.

Earlier on the same page, Morrison achieves a very different, and startling effect, using a far more novel metaphor. Jakob has suffered the deaths of several young children, and when he finds his way to the seashore in a contemplative, hopeful mood, this is how Morrison describes it:

He gazed at the occasional dapple of starlight on the water, then bent down and placed his hands in it. Sand moved under his palms; infant waves died above his wrists, soaking the cuffs of his sleeves.

The vast possibilities of the ocean (and of the New World for which he has crossed it) reach Jakob only in the form of “infant waves” dying in his hands. It’s a grim, startling passage, and one made all the more sad by the fact that Jakob seems scarcely aware of the fragility of his hopes, and even less aware of how the life he dreams of forging for himself might ruin the lives and hopes of those under his power.

Morrison is also capable of imbuing her writing with intense and beautifully evoked sensuality. Here’s a passage coming only a few pages later, from the point of view of Florens, a slave who has fallen for a free black blacksmith:

There will never be enough time to look how you move. Your arm goes up to strike iron. You drop to one knee. You bend. You stop to pour water first on the iron then down your throat. Before you know I am in the world I am already kill by you. My mouth is open, my legs go softly and the heart is stretching to break.

Passages like these defeat my critical faculties completely—all I can do is sit back and admire them. Morrison is an engrossing storyteller and a prose stylist of the first order, and she writes with both great sensitivity and thunderous moral authority. I know this is news to precisely no one, but here I’ll say it again: Toni Morrison is a great writer, and she has fully earned her early induction into the canon.