Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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Brick Lane by Monica Ali
(Scribner, 2003)
Eileen Y. Lee

“If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”

Monica Ali’s most recently published novel, Untold Story, is the “what-if” tale of Princess Diana—what if the glamorous icon had not died in a Parisian car crash and instead had moved secretly to Midwest America with a new identity and taken up the simpler life?  The book was released in the UK during the run-up to this past year’s royal wedding media extravaganza.  Ali, however, started her writing career in different waters with the socially aware Brick Lane, the story of a married Bangladeshi woman living in London public housing.  This first novel thrust the Dhaka-born, Oxford-educated author into the literary stratosphere, earning her a nod as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, while Brick Lane was short-listed for the Man Booker prize.

The beating heart of Brick Lane is Nazneen, a village girl who is sent to London for an arranged marriage to a 40-year-old man.  Part immigrant story and part meditation on the fate of women from a particular religious and cultural background, the novel is ultimately focused on Nazneen’s transformation from passive Muslim housewife into an individual possessed of free will who says, “I will decide what to do.  I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”  This transformation happens—but not before one begins to wonder whether her richly-detailed life will simply collect dust as the narrative moves from 1985 to the months following September 11^th.

During its quiet unfolding, Brick Lane flits between Nazneen’s childhood memories of her sorrowful mother and letters from Hasina, the sister she had to leave behind in Bangladesh.  The letters depict a life filled with hardship and small joys, all written in Hasina’s broken English and naïve voice.  Even shocking details about her own rape and then a story about a friend burned with acid as punishment is told in several letters rather matter-of-factly.

As a chronicle of Nazneen’s marriage, Brick Lane is delightfully comical and at other times, sadly painful.  Early on, Nazneen learns to put aside any “high notions” of herself when she overhears her husband, Chanu, on the telephone: “Perhaps when she gets older she’ll grow a beard on her chin, but now she is only eighteen.  And a blind uncle is better than no uncle.  I waited too long to get a wife.”  Pretentious Chanu is continually the source of a good chuckle whenever he rails against the “ignorant types” of British society or forces his wife to listen to his pedantic speeches on philosophy or his “first love,” English literature.  “Have you heard of Richard II?” he says, “It’s not easy to translate.  Give me one minute.  This is a wonderful passage.”

Chanu is as equally proud of his university degrees as he is of his numerous framed certificates from night classes and correspondence courses on such varied topics as cycling and IT communications.  Driven to improve himself, yet ineffectual in his career, Chanu speaks constantly of a promotion that the reader—and Nazneen, as she grows more insightful—knows he will never get.  While a gentle soul, he can sometimes be heartless towards Nazneen, such as when he condescendingly mocks her suggestion to go to Dhaka to locate Hasina, who leaves her love marriage and must fend for herself in Bangladesh’s capital city.  He says:

“Shall I pack a suitcase?  Perhaps you have prepared one.  I shall go to Dhaka and pluck her instantly from the streets and bring her back to live with us.  On the way, I could pick up the rest of your family and we could make a little Gouripur right here.  Is that what you have in mind?”

It is only because of Ali’s sensitive regard for her characters that Chanu does not become a caricature of a husband.  Chanu eventually garners his own sympathy as his full portrait is painted, showing that he is a decent husband, loving father to their two daughters, and a man of quashed ambitions in a society that lumps him together with every other dark-skinned immigrant.

At its most incisive, Brick Lane is a sustained study of both its major and minor characters.  Even when the novel’s plot languishes midway through, the supporting cast in Nazneen’s life continues to shine.   Her best friend, Razia, is feisty (“Do you know why I’m going to learn English?  So that when my children start telling dirty jokes behind my back, I’ll be able to whip their backsides.”), but chooses to turn a blind eye to her son’s worsening drug addiction until nearly all the furniture in their home is sold.  She lives a life that matches her independent spirit only after her controlling husband is killed in a factory accident by the crush of “seventeen frozen cows.”  If there is a villain in Brick Lane it is Mrs. Islam, the elderly, sweet-tongued usurer lady, who will bring along her thug sons to enforce payments in the neighborhood.  Her changing relationship with Nazneen is woven throughout the story.

The most pivotal character is the decisive community organizer, Karim, who also delivers clothes for Nazneen’s sewing jobs and is therefore able to cross the threshold into her domestic world.  His appearance as her younger lover comes as a surprise, as is Nazneen’s decision to start attending radical Bengal Tigers meetings at his encouragement.  This is the first time the outside world penetrates her narrow life—as talk of the World Trade Center attacks comes to dominate the local meetings and her family’s mailbox becomes the target of a “leaflet war” that seeks to draw or erase the battle lines between “native” and “Islamic” elements.

Nazneen finds herself in turmoil over her relationship with Karim.  At these times, Ali’s graceful writing can unfortunately veer towards romance novel territory with such sentences as this: “Unbidden, a memory of Karim came, entering her as he entered her, tearing apart her passive soul.”

Karim sees Nazneen as a concept of maternity and security (“A Bengali wife.  A Bengali mother.  An idea of home”) and hopes they may marry, but time is running out as Chanu aspires to take his wife and daughters back to Bangladesh.  In the end, Nazneen’s choice is not between her husband and Karim, or London and Bangladesh, instead she must decide to be the director of her own destiny.  For those who have waited patiently for the dust on the pages to be swept away, the last chapters provide a frenetic energy and offer an ending filled with hope and new beginnings.

Eileen Y. Lee has a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.  She studied abroad in London for one year and counts it as one of her favorite cities in the world.

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Personal Folklore

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather,” says Natalia Stefanovi, the narrator of Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife, “lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man” (32).

Though narrated by Natalia, the novel’s true protagonist is her grandfather, a respected physician who has just passed away in a remote village in the former Yugoslavia. Natalia, a newly graduated doctor, is on a humanitarian mission to vaccinate orphans in nearby Brejevina, just across the border. (Natalia takes pains, in light of the still-fresh wounds of the Balkan conflicts, to leave nations and ethnic identities undefined: “Twelve years ago, before the war, the people of Brejevina had been our people,” she writes. “The border had been a joke” (15).) Natalia’s present-day tale gives the novel its overarching frame, while her grandfather’s two interwoven stories provide The Tiger’s Wife with a rich, folkloric atmosphere.

In the story of the deathless man, Natalia recounts her grandfather’s tales of a series of encounters with Gavran Gailé, who claims to have been cursed with the inability to die. Gailé appears for the last time on the eve of a massive bombing campaign, a harbinger of the wave of destruction to come. The deathless man challenges everything the grandfather has based his medical career upon, hinting at the presence of a world beyond what can be observed scientifically.

The grandfather’s other story concerns a freed tiger that haunted his boyhood village over the course of a punishing winter, and the local butcher’s wife who fell in love with the creature. The woman, deaf and mute in addition to being a “Mohammedan” brought back to the village by the butcher, is mistrusted by the villagers as an outsider. Her connection to the tiger, which she draws to the smokehouse with offerings of meat, thrills and fascinates the boy, who is already obsessed with the exotic images of the tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (a recurring touchstone throughout The Tiger’s Wife). He watches in dismay as the villagers hunt the tiger, a clear symbol of their fears of the world outside their village.

The two tales, braided around Natalia’s present-day story, come together brilliantly in the novel’s third act. Gavran Gailé refuses to remain a mere piece of folklore from the past, as Natalia has her own encounter with him. Obreht pans out from the story of the villagers’ panic over the tiger to describe an isolated place cursed by history. The episode with the tiger “became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks, and later their railroad, which the villagers were made to build; and finally the train, the rattle and cough of the tracks that pulled them awake at night (every time they thought don’t stop here, don’t stop) . . .” (337).

War pervades The Tiger’s Wife without quite appearing on the page, at least not for long. When Natalia recounts her teenage years, spent flaunting imminent bombings by staying out all night with her friends, the war itself remains a distant rumor, a constant threat of obliteration that arrives only after the city’s residents have begun to dismiss it. Obreht wrings more pathos from the war by describing its effects on the distressed and starving inhabitants of the city’s zoo than by showing the bombs falling:

“[F]or weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black” (302).

The Tiger’s Wife overflows with stories, evoking a land rich in complex, contentious history, with unclear boundaries between the personal and the political, the historic and the mythological. The grandfather’s tales span two transformative wars, describing a nation ripped from peaceful isolation into uneasy modernity. His stories, on their face the stuff of tall tales told to children, are as relevant to the future of this region’s people as the day’s current events.

Obreht writes in a strong, clear prose style that’s well-suited to the folkloric quality of much of the novel. The book’s only real weakness is the more rushed, less distinguished prose in much of the present-day thread; Natalia seems relatively less substantial, less distinguished, set against the deathless man and the tiger’s wife.

Still, it’s a forgivable lapse: Obreht seems to have too many good, old stories to tell, too many compelling legends to share, to linger for too long in the present.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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I’ll Take the Crazy Uncle Instead

Sometimes when I’m relating tediously essential information to a co-worker—inconsistencies within a fiscal report, for instance—I’ll notice a glaze of boredom slip over her eyes for a few seconds before she starts, then mutters apologetically: “Can you repeat that? I know your mouth was moving, but all I heard was blahBLAH blahBLAH blahBLAH.” This is how I often felt while reading Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel, Sister. What is on one level an eminently readable novel, with predictably-paced forward motion, is on another level a tepid rehashing of every Law and Order episode and blasé Hollywood cop-conspiracy movie you’ve ever seen. Ultimately, the blahBLAH diagnosis proves fatal for this modern crime thriller as it attempts a 285-page uphill tease before squashing not one, not two, but three twists into a tiresome 30-page finale.

To be fair, perhaps my expectations were set too highly. I was a victim of aggressive marketing. Already released in the UK and slated for US release in June 2011, the advanced reader’s plain blue cover demanded, in bold yellow letters, that I “READ THE UK PHENOMENON THAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT!” Beneath this was a smattering of succinct praise: “Exceptionally confident domestic gothic thriller,” says The Guardian; “Stunningly accomplished,” says Daily Mail; “Utterly compelling,” says Closer Magazine. I felt bullied and won over before I’d even opened the thing.

As one might expect, Sister revolves around the indissoluble link between two siblings: Beatrice, an uptight marketing executive transplanted in Manhattan, and Tess, her beautiful bohemian counterpart, recently found dead of an apparent suicide. Beatrice, distraught over her sister’s death, returns to London where she finds the situation immediately suspect. Her sister’s flat provides the stock setting for an unraveling crime, replete with stereotypically charged props: baby clothes for a stillborn child, creepy lullabies recorded on an antiquated answering machine, paintings of masked men, a broken window, an unplugged phone.

And voilá. You can already begin to see where this is going. Is the uptight exec going to come undone and discover what is truly important in life while solving the crime? Is the world going to attempt to sully the beautiful sister’s character only to have her returned to eternal grace? Yup and yup. The initial pairing of these female archetypes, with their ready-made impending reversals, is only the first of many stock characterizations. Coming up: a couple of incompetent detectives, one kooky psychiatrist, an overbearing mother, a posse of art students with facial piercings, some slimy men, and the pregnant woman who looks like a prostitute but has a heart of gold. If you feel like you’ve met them before, it’s because you have—they’re cliché characters given screenplay-sketched personas, with none of the fat an actor would bring to the role.

It’s not surprising that Lupton’s bio notes that she spent many years as a scriptwriter. Even the opening lines, rendered in a conversational tone, have the air of a voice-over. The story begins in letter format, with the words “Dearest Tess, I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment…” One expects this direct dynamic to shift, as these things often do, into a more traditional first-person narrative. Let the cinematic action commence! But Lupton chooses to keep the entire novel in letter format, a technique which she manages, surprisingly, to pull off and which occasionally yields the one element I ultimately valued: a transformation of the reader.

In fiction workshops, we’re warned consistently against the use of the second-person point of view. A sprinkling, perhaps. We’re pointed towards Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big Cities, as an anomalous 80’s-fueled exception, with the caveat: You can’t replicate it, so don’t try. In Sister, Lupton uses the “you” address in a more poetic fashion, most often in an implied manner, married to the “I”, or in extremely personal moments. There were plenty of times when the “you” didn’t move me, but instead reinforced my intrusion in a narrative fixture. But when it worked, it worked well. It drew me so strongly into the text that for brief moments I felt a direct connection, a merging of my past with Tess’ past, which was, in and of itself, a weird contemplative flare on death and the impotent status of the reader. For instance, when Beatrice says, “he also reminded me of Mr. Normans (did you have him for math?)”, there is that brief moment where I found myself thinking, Wait…who did I have for math?

And yet, it was all too few and far between. Even such remarkable flares could not compensate for the thin characters, increasingly preposterous plot, and unintentionally hilarious moments. When Beatrice says “my ending was a strand of hair caught in a zipper,” I just don’t know what that means. And when the killer, in the middle of an attempted murder, says (this is not a spoiler), “Who has an answering machine nowadays with a tape? Everyone’s got voice mail through their telephone provider,” I laughed out loud. A couple pages later comes the line “[The killer's] hubris was huge and naked and shocking.”

SPOILER…or not: the killer is a man. In fact, this would never have been a spoiler because Lupton seems to have imbued her entire novel with a militantly feminist bent. Not many of the characters are particularly likeable, but the men tend towards the heinous: the abandoning father, abusive boyfriend, lukewarm fiancé, despicable adulterer, stalker, dismissive policemen and, well, the murderer. And while it did not seem surprising to me that Lupton’s brief bio mentioned her scriptwriting credentials, I did find it strange that the only other thing mentioned was that she lives with her husband and two sons.

While I clearly wasn’t wowed here, I do believe there are interesting elements at play with both the novel and the author. I don’t mean to insinuate an inherent failure. Lupton is clearly skilled. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be so riled up. She understands the quintessential elements of successful pop fiction: a clipped pace, an emphasis on plot, a particular economy of language. Perhaps she just needs a little bit more time to adjust to the lushness, nuances and complexity that the novel form offers. By her third or fourth book I expect to be won over.

Beth Steidle is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, DIAGRAM, and several anthologies.

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Gina Ochsner weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters living in a slum-like apartment building in Perm, a city in post-Soviet Siberia, in her introspective first novel, The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight. The characters the reader spends most time with are Olga, whose job at the newspaper The Red Star is to “translate” distressing news stories into more palatable terms; her son Yuri, a young vet damaged by the war who prefers to spend more time with fish than people; Azade, a lavatory attendant who longs for the home her Muslim parents were forced to leave; and Tanya, a museum coat-check girl who dreams of losing weight so she can work as an airline stewardess among the clouds.

When the novel opens, Tanya, Yuri, and the other workers at the “All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum” are informed that they will be visited by a group of Americans who want to donate a substantial amount of money to the Russian museum they find most promising. Much of the novel is spent preparing to impress these American women when they visit. Their arrival sets off a comical series of misunderstandings as it becomes clear they are looking for a romanticized version of Russian culture, not the difficult and often dirty reality these characters live from day to day.

Ochsner (and her characters) deal with these realities with grim humor—for instance, one of the “perks” of working a museum job for months without a paycheck is free use of the toilets. These quirks of Ochsner’s humor are often emphasized by magical realism. In the first chapter, Azade’s husband Mircha, commits suicide by leaping from the roof of the apartment building. But he sticks around for the rest of the novel, his ghost running around voicing opinions while his body—unable to be buried in the still-frozen ground—lies on the trash heap.

But the gritty humor of these details is always held in balance with the genuine struggle the characters must face because of them, and their psychological consequences. Yuri hides from the world in a cosmonaut helmet left behind by his dead father. Olga despairs of the ability of language to convey truth. Tanya, an artist at heart, records her thoughts and observations of clouds in a notebook she carries with her, but cannot express herself to anyone. Working in a museum where all of the exhibits are cheap forgeries and imitations, Tanya tries to recreate icons of the Madonna and Child with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and eye shadow, which promptly drip and turn into brightly colored smears.

Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks. (183)

Although Tanya feels that she has failed in her attempt to create something beautiful, to reach the transcendent through her humble materials, the reader cannot help but feel that she has achieved it simply through trying, through believing that it is possible.

The above passage is typical of Ochsner’s lyrical prose. Her pages are saturated with beautiful language, almost to the point of leveling out the perspectives of the different characters. As Yuri ice-fishes with his head encased in his helmet, the reader might have a hard time believing his thoughts could be as poetic and profound as those that Tanya records in her notebook. And perhaps her thoughts, along with the poetic longings of Azade for a home she doesn’t fully remember, would have even more weight had the language been moderated with other characters.

However, the characters themselves remain distinct. Each is occupied by different problems, has a different rhythm to their thought, and their own desires. These characters are all real people, complete with flaws and prejudices and insecurities that separate them from each other. Tanya says: “Suffering, if beautifully done, is an art form.” In the end, it is their suffering that brings these characters together, as well as their hopeful struggle to bring beauty and meaning to their lives.

Rosemary Callenberg lives in Western Pennsylvania, where she is working towards her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. It is here that, among other things, she teaches, writes, and pursues her love of beauty and of words.

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Dimming the Illumination

At 8:17 p.m. on a Friday, people begin to see pain as auras of light. This is the premise of Kevin Brockmeier’s recent novel, The Illumination. Early in the story, a recent divorcée named Carol Ann slices her finger with a kitchen knife and goes to the hospital. There, she encounters her roommate, Patricia, a car crash victim who arrived with a journal of her husband’s love notes. Patricia believes her husband died in the accident that fatally wounded her, and she cannot bear to read his adoring words. However, she feels compelled to share them with Carol Ann. Patricia’s internal injuries flare like a supernova, and then slowly ebb after she flat lines.

This event initiates a series of chapters that follow the journal’s new owners: Carol Ann, who is making her way back into the dating scene; Jason, Patricia’s self-mutilating husband; Chuck, an abused boy with a skewed view of society and pain; Ryan, a missionary who is only spreading the “Good News” in memory of his religious sister; Nina, an author who believes she can speak with her deceased fiancé; and Morse, a telepathic homeless man. Regretfully, the story could have ended with Jason. He and Carol Ann have full, complex plotlines, while the other characters seem like an afterthought used only to illuminate different types and degrees of pain.

Events in the chapters are nonlinear and each main character appears in the background of a previous chapter. After Carol Ann’s doctor discovers the journal and convinces her to return it, the divorcée’s chapter culminates in her greeting Jason as he hobbles up her steps. But readers never see their confrontation. Carol Ann’s chapter ends there, and during Jason’s chapter, the scene between them is condensed into a three-sentence summary. This is the first break in what had been thorough prose. Brockmeier had set up a scene of heart-wrenching anticipation, but then concentrates on photojournalism, self-mutilation, and what could be interpreted legally as corruption of a minor. The journal Jason strove to find lays unwanted on a coffee table and suddenly, the worst month of his life is rendered inconsequential.

From there, Brockmeier passes the journal among a succession of long-suffering owners, focusing more on the characters’ relationship with the text than their supernatural inclinations. Chuck, who steals the journal, is a little boy who can see pain from inanimate objects. But Brockmeier does not explore the concept of residual energy or an object’s ability to retain a person’s memories or emotions. Rather, he concentrates on the abuse Chuck receives from his parents and the boy’s attempts to restore the book by reapplying the cover and ironing the pages. He thinks the book is in pain, instead of retaining pain. Eventually, he admits defeat and gives it to Ryan, who has encountered harrowing experiences but cannot die. Ryan, who is curious about the love notes and takes the journal for something to read, forgets it in a hotel’s nightstand, where Nina finds it. She is grieving the loss of her fiancé and is nursing perpetual canker sores that hinder her ability to communicate. She falls in love with the journal and places it on her bookcase, where her son finds and trades it to the telepathic Morse in exchange for a role playing game’s rare manual. This is where the journal’s timeline ends.

Notably, although Brockmeier provides beautiful imagery of the Illumination, he does not explore the psychological or emotional implications of people seeing each other’s pain as light. Most of the characters are not embarrassed by the varying coronas their bodies emit, nor do they try to hide them—instead, they are fascinated. For example, Jason is more fixated than humiliated by a bowel irritation that illuminates his anus with tiny sparks that are visible through his jeans. Only Nina seems discomfited by how the auras highlight her illness. Furthermore, Brockmeier skims over larger controversial issues like the suffering of animals. He mentions bursts of light radiating from a dog as children throw rocks at it, squirrels and possums exploding into rolling fireworks as they are struck by cars, and two men discussing the newfound empirical evidence that “the lower creatures of the world” feel pain. But that conversation is a one-sentence description of a talk show. There are no zoo or park scenes, and no one has pets. Brockmeier mentions pain from inanimate objects and emotions more than sentient animals. Perhaps this lack of analysis and self-consciousness is a form of magical realism—the characters continue living as if the light had always existed, and very few show concern.

Brockmeier’s unique, often sublime descriptions left this reader captivated and wondering whether his style would remain uniform throughout the story. He is skilled at employing dramatic irony; though the readers know the journal’s history, the characters can only speculate on it. However, Brockmeier’s tendency to accelerate the narrative by telling the readers what happened, rather than showing them, produces distance between the narrator’s voice and the characters’ actions. Readers are never plopped inside a character to experience events. This lack of intimacy seems odd in a story where the characters have uncomfortably accurate knowledge of one another’s personal ailments. A third person point of view further enhances the distance because each character’s dialogue or writing echoes the narrator’s voice.

Readers who are drawn to magical realism and speculative fiction might enjoy The Illumination. The visual descriptions are captivating and the writing is sophisticated despite the distant and uniform voice. Yet, readers might ultimately be more interested in the journal’s voyage than in the characters themselves.

Nicole Bartley is an escape artist. Her specialties include writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and folklore. She received a bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University for creative writing and journalism, and is an MFA candidate in the fiction track at Chatham University. She is determined to maintain a career around books.

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If you’ve heard of Alan Moore, it’s probably for his groundbreaking work on comics like Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which contributed to the respect that has emerged for comics as an art form over the past 20 years. Possibly you only know of him through the terrible movies adapted from those books—but let’s hope not. Moore had the good sense to take his name off those projects and tends to be pretty grumpy about movies and superhero comics in general when asked about them in interviews. Instead, he prefers to talk about more arcane subjects like history, religion, and magic.

Moore’s become known as an authority on that last subject. On his fortieth birthday he declared himself a magician, devoted himself to occult studies and started worshipping an old Roman snake god. It sounds crazy until you hear him explain magic as the manipulation of symbols (like words) to alter people’s consciousness (like stories), and that there basically is no difference between the word “spell” (as in to spell a word) and the word spell (as in to cast a spell). Then it only sounds kind of crazy.

In the mid-90s, during one of Moore’s periodic withdrawals from the world of comics, he wrote a prose book that explores his ideas about magic and the tenuous relationship between big ideas like truth, fiction, and history. Originally printed in paperback in 1996, Voice of the Fire was largely ignored, but Moore’s American comic publisher later went ahead and produced a beautiful hardcover edition featuring book design by Chip Kidd, an introduction by Neil Gaiman (the most successful comic writer to cross over into novels), and illustrated plates by José Villarrubia. The book was once again largely ignored.

Within half a page, it’s easy to see why the book remains an afterthought in Moore’s body of work. The opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of a half-witted prehistoric youth who can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming, is as hard to follow as any book in the English language. And it’s not exactly lyrically on par with Joyce. Take this passage for example:

There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to the wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I.

There are 50 more pages where that came from!

Yet, over the course of those 50 pages, you can’t help but feel for this wandering pre-historic half-wit surrounded by powerful forces he can’t even put a name to, let alone understand. And the limited language begins to work its particular kind of magic, especially when the boy struggles to “glean that one may say of thing while thing is not,” an apt description of magic, fiction, history, or a lie.

From the tale of the man-child, Moore moves through time with a series of first-person narratives taking place in and around his hometown of Northampton. The reliability of these narratives vary, but themes of deception, betrayal, and disillusionment repeat themselves throughout, as do images of giant black dogs, one legged cripples and sacrificial fires. If you were interested in making distinctions, you’d be hard pressed to decide if Voice of the Fire is a novel, a set of interconnected stories, or something else altogether.

Some of the chapters could work alone as short stories, some more as character sketches. In every chapter, it’s impressive how expertly Moore inhabits each of these narrators, from a Bronze Age murderess to a hobbled and aging crusader to the disembodied head displayed on a pike outside the city gate, giving them a voice that’s uniquely theirs. This talent for first person narration carries over from Moore’s comic work, where he uses caption boxes (previously been reserved in comics for exposition or redundant descriptions of the action on the page) to render carefully crafted internal monologues.* In fact, he’s so convincing that many readers associate the views of Watchmen’s ultra-conservative, homicidal vigilante Rorschach with Moore himself.

Another of Moore’s formal concerns from comics that apply to his only novel so far is the depiction of time. Moore frequently uses the visual nature of comics to challenge standard perceptions of time. For Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen all of time happens at once, leading Moore (and artist Dave Gibbons) to juxtapose images from different periods in the character’s life in a narrative that’s just as associative as it is linear.

Many chapters in Voice of the Fire display a similar concern with time, crosscutting between flashbacks and present tense action, but what’s more interesting is how the novel as a whole deals with time. It spans centuries in what seems like a linear narrative, but images keep repeating, characters from the past appear before a more contemporary one in inexplicable visions, and key plot elements of disillusionment and treachery constantly recur. The book seems to ask, are we all as helpless as that half-witted manchild from chapter one, unable to tell the difference between waking and dream, “a thing that is become a thing that is not”? Yet as the book progresses and characters repeatedly march towards despair and doom, it becomes exhausting. Maybe we all have the same basic story, but do we have to read it over and over again?

Moore, however, rewards the intrepid reader with an absolutely stunning last chapter, which begins with the author typing the final words from the previous chapter. We arrive then, all the way from prehistory to present tense. We follow Alan Moore through the process of trying to find an ending to his novel in what is part first-person narrative (which never uses the words “I” or “me”), part metafiction, part essay, and part history lesson.

Despite a few rough spots, Voice of the Fire puts the reader right into the head of a unique and visionary artist, one who is prone to believing in a mad idea or two and is nearly convincing enough to make the reader believe, too. By that criteria, the book might quite possibly be an incantation in and of itself.

Steve Gillies is a 3rd year MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh and co-editor in chief of Hot Metal Bridge. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, The AV Club, and the American Journal of Orthopedics.

* Readers interested in Moore’s process for these first-person narrations should read his essay “Writing For Comics,” where he describes how he imagines every psychological and physiological detail of his characters, to the point where he stumbles around his room shouting and pretending to be Etrigan the Demon. That’s dedication to craft.

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“The Special Artist” is the rare story that takes its inspiration from an historical figure—Winslow Homer, sketching the Civil War—to create a very contemporary portrait of longing, depression, and identity. The prose paints portraits as convincingly detailed as the protagonist’s drawings; it’s hauntingly convincing and beautifully resonant.

The Special Artist
by Bill Taft

On the good days, Winslow’s eyes were full of a power that rivaled the sun’s. But on the bad days, the eyes were no more radiant than a lamp just run out of oil—dim, the wick burning itself to nothing, a dull ember. On the good days, Winslow did not comb his grey, curly hair. He left it tangled like a crown of brambles in which he could stash a pencil. The bushy whiskers of his mustache stuck out like the bristles of a broom. On the bad days, he would wet the hair down, comb it into submission and secure it in place with an expensive pomade. He had seen undertakers give such attention to corpses, rendering them exquisite before their final farewell. The lemon smell of the pomade tormented Winslow, made him think of sailors with their stories of the Florida Keys. Despite what others said and thought, Winslow didn’t like sailors, or Florida. Oh, the people thought they knew him. They were wrong. On the bad days, he would threaten his mustache with shaving. There was one constant: on both good and bad days, Winslow dreamed of finding a way to rid the grey from his hair. He was only twenty-three, too young to look like his father.
Army of the Potomac

In July of 1861, the Union troops milled about Alexandria, Virginia preparing for the orders to move further south. Observing, watching, studying the men, stood Winslow Homer. A month before he had been given the title “Special Artist” by Hiram Harper, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, one of the nation’s struggling new illustrated newspapers. As a Special Artist, it was Winslow’s duty to move about the front lines of battle, sketching and drawing images of the war which Harper’s could then publish. And so Winslow moved, with steady and deliberate cunning through the streets of Alexandria, into the saloon of the Gersham Hotel.

Winslow stood at the bar, charcoal stick in hand, scratching away at a piece of paper until the likeness of Lieutenant Francis Channing Barlow of the 61st New York Infantry began to appear. His subject ignored him, choosing instead to focus his attention on the tumbler of Dutch gin in his hand. Barlow was clean-shaven, perhaps obsessively and vainly so, his way of saying he had so much hair on the top of his head, so much thick and lustrous jet-black hair that there was nary a follicle left with which to grow a beard. This was at least, Winslow’s assessment, for the job of the artist is to divine the character of each and every subject at hand. Winslow judged Barlow’s expression to be one of anger—clenched jaw, crooked lips. Not sellable. For every image Harper’s ran, Winslow received the payment of a twenty-dollar gold piece, true wealth. Other illustrated papers, Ballou’s or Appleton’s paid more, twenty-five or thirty dollars, but they paid in paper money, printed scrip of small worth held.

The lieutenant leaned back and raised his drink upwards, making a great show of the gesture, as if it were the last Dutch gin he’d ever know and that once he’d drained it, he would march out into the street and happily sacrifice himself in battle against a legion of lost pirates, or a hoard of wild cannibals, or an ancient tribe of pike-wielding Celts come to ravish the women of America. Much better. Winslow scratched away at the paper. The soft gaslight of the Gersham Hotel Saloon offered Winslow much in the way of shadow. The occasional sound of carriage wheels on cobblestones could be heard from the outside. The clatter of hooves grew louder, peaked, then fell away into the night. Sound should be in drawings. One day he’d make it so.

Barlow turned towards Winslow. “What are you drinking?”

“St. Charles Punch.” Winslow spoke while continuing to draw.

“A lady’s drink?”

“Just because a drink has ice in it doesn’t mean its not a man’s drink.” The lines in the image of Barlow became deeper, darker.

Barlow raised a hand to catch the barkeep’s attention.

“McClellan is partial to lady’s drinks as well. His caution is that of lady’s. His lack of imagination is that of a lady’s.” Barlow spoke with increasing volume. “Tomorrow, we board ships. Mrs. McClellan is planning her summer offensive and the pleasure of our company has been requested.” The barkeep set another Dutch gin before Barlow. Eyes focused on Winslow, Barlow reached for his drink and continued, “You should join us. It’s sure to be a grand affair. The Army of the Potomac…” He turned towards the barkeep. “And you, sir, should come along as well. Bring your store of ice, and make a St. Charles Punch for Mrs. McClellan.”

The next day was a bad day. A hung over Winslow sat on the grassy bank of the Potomac. A steam whistle from one of the riverboats, docked on the opposite side, blew out low and long, its rumble forcing a flock of crows from the willow trees. Beyond the trees, troops advanced on horseback, towards the dock, each horseman carrying a long stick. Winslow reached for his spyglass then aimed it at the approaching column. They were carrying lances, long shafts of timber with steel points at the ends. Squadron colors, red and gold, tied around the head of each lance, billowed out in the breeze. Winslow set down his spy glass, pecked at his sketch pad and then gave up. The black stuff was on him. He had always been prone to bouts of melancholy, days spent a prisoner weighed down by dirty sheets. The usual cures offered no relief: extracts from henbane caused headaches, thorn apple and St. John’s Wort led to the runs. The Sumerians had praised the benefits of the opium poppy in the 3rd millennium, but Winslow could not agree with their verdict. The drug kept his face from moving. Death would solve the problem. But suicide was a sin, a vexing complication to the plot. Winslow packed his gear, set out to meet Barlow and claim a berth upon the ship. As he walked along the bank, he swore at his mustache, periodically stopping to pull out a mirror and comb his hair. The slick pomade stank like a rotten orange, and made his hair look wet, like the fur of a seal just risen from the sea to rest on a rock in the sunshine, or the hair of a drowned boy just dragged from the river. Of the two images, Winslow discarded the former and fixated on the latter.

The Vanquished Rest In Peace

Barlow’s men, Winslow among them, headed south upon the river toward fortress Monroe where they disembarked two days later and marched into battle against rebel forces, a fight full of musket and cannon fire, gut-shot men, and bloody horses impaled on the spokes of shattered wagon wheels, hooves moving as if clip clopping in the air. Winslow found himself to be elated by the conflict all around him. He went out seeking an image.

The rebel soldier lay sprawled out on the rocky high ground above the valley. A line of ants marched in and out of his ear, and in the stillness Winslow could hear the flies buzzing about the corpse, their wings beating furiously in the heat of the noonday sun. It was a good day. Winslow sat down on an overturned barrel and began to sketch the outlines of the body, the way the arm angled up, parallel to the rifle at his side. Winslow’s editor at Harper’s Weekly had demanded he give them something that would compare to the photographs of Matthew Brady. Now, Winslow regretted kowtowing to the aesthetic demands of Hiram Harper. The afternoon they’d met, Hiram had been sitting in his wheel chair on the seventh floor of the New York office, berating his amanuensis with demands to increase circulation and raise subscriptions, as if a mere amanuensis could achieve such a goal. Winslow had sat by the desk, staring at the elephant tusk upon it, thinking the assignment would be a blessing, a way to do great things, unlike his father who had done nothing.

Winslow tried emphasizing the dead soldier’s hand, but the image was too real. There was no music in it. A crow landed on the corpse and began to pick at a strand of grey fiber hanging loose from his jacket. Go ahead, build your nest, thought Winslow. I’ve no use for him. Winslow set his sketch pad down on his knee, flipped the paper back to a new sheet, then drew the face of Brady, fatter, the eyes rendered useless, blind, by the folds of flesh around them, and then, feasting upon it, a crow. The crows could have Brady, and his plates of glass, and tripods and cameras. That’s what those cameras were, birdhouses.

“Mr. Homer, sir, Lieutenant Barlow has sent me to inform you that we will soon be moving on and if you desire our protection you must leave with us.”

Winslow looked at the young solider, the coat too big, the pants too tight, the musket with a cracked shoulder stock.

“Do you think I’m an old man crippled by gout, waiting to tell my grandchildren about the battle of Buena Vista and the senoritas of Monterey? Don’t let my grey hair fool you. I am a Special Artist. I need no protection,” said Winslow.

The boy solider blinked, coughed, nodded, blinked again. “The lieutenant has received orders to march on towards Mooresville.” The boy turned around and left.

Winslow sought a new sheet of paper, sketched the boy’s face, close up, the hint of a mustache, the cheeks a mother would never kiss again. The slain boy-soldier. A sacrifice. Must put the weeping mother in the frame somehow. Montage? Very sellable. I am the hack. I am the hack. Must hack off, I.

In the distance, the dull thuds of mortar fire echoed across the river valley. Winslow walked over to the dead rebel, felt around in his pockets for any money, tobacco, a clue of some kind to his personality, and found nothing. Still, a good day all around.

A Night Reconnaissance

A month and a half before, as Winslow had received his letter of Special Artist status,
Hiram Harper had been specific in his opinions about his countrymen, his readers.

“The people are corrupt. They are vile and cannot be trusted with power. They are lost, confused sheep milling about the railroad tracks, blind to the locomotives vomiting smoke, bearing down upon them. You will not find me on the wrong side of the locomotive.” Hiram paused. “Which side will you be on?”

Before Winslow could answer, Hiram gave him precise instructions: “You will illustrate the story I want to tell the people.”

Now, after two months in the field, Winslow began to be ashamed of his work. He’d sold four pictures, had them couriered back to New York, but he’d sketched the obvious, the trite. A voice inside him grew louder, challenging him to see something different, to at least put his point of view into the work.

Lieutenant Barlow led a small squad of soldiers up an embankment towards the edge of a corn field and the beginning of a pumpkin patch. Stars flickered in the black night above. There was no moon. Barlow parted the green stalks of corn to reveal a Confederate encampment two to three hundred yards away. The rebel campfires backlit peaked tents, the men on guard, a horse tethered to a post, causing them to cast strange shadows. Winslow crouched down a few yards away from Barlow’s men beside a big fat orange pumpkin. Winslow liked the pumpkin, ran his finger along the gnarled stem. If he bashed the pumpkin over the head of Barlow—who did not wear a hat while on patrol!—then what? Laugh at the lieutenant and his new head of orange hair, stringy sticky hair of flat white seeds. Where is your lion’s mane now, lieutenant? A unique image. The noble soldier with a gourd head. Pumpkins and corn laid out in neat endless lines, rigid furrows, a bullying geometry, like soldiers on parade. Vegetables, march! Pumpkin army, attack! Must draw right away. Winslow began cutting the image into the pumpkin surface with his thumbnail. The more animated he became, the more his knees pressed into the dried leaves around him. His rustling sounded like a grizzly bear rolling about on a cage floor full of discarded, crumpled drawings. Barlow removed his saber, aimed its tip at Winslow, whispered a single word: “Silence.”

An Unexpected Reversal

The Union advance was stopped and forced to retreat by a Confederate counter attack full of whooping and yelling, and femurs cracked by minnie balls, and chins torn open by shrapnel, and spines made useless by slugs of lead shot from rifled barrels.

“We’re heading to the rear,” said the boy soldier, the one Winslow thought would surely have perished by now.

“A rather stunning reversal of the situation,” said Winslow. He packed his bag.

“Barlow says you are not to join us,” said the boy.

As Barlow’s men retreated, so did Winslow’s bravado and confidence. He preferred to reject, not be rejected. A tide had turned. The good days gave way to bad. He plastered his grey hair to the top of his head with pomade. The smell of lemons made him gag. He called his mustache terrible names, shaved off half of it, and set out in the opposite direction of the retreat, towards what he hoped would be his own end. But death is fickle, it is not a servant one can order about, it is not like the Gersham Hotel, a place where one can book a room in advance, for a specific day and hour. Death is a locomotive, chugging down a track, locked into a predetermined schedule. The train would choose him when it was time, he could not choose it, unless he bought a ticket, in advance, like a hotel reservation. Bad analogy. Stop, he told himself. Winslow lay down in the leaves of the forest floor, certain of one thing: he had become his father. A coward. A fraud. A hollow gourd.

Winslow’s father wrote religious tracts—flowery treatises celebrating Christ and free love—that no one took seriously. His father wrote, but did not act. The man lived in a fantasy world. The butcher, the printer, the blacksmith all thought he was a crank, poor and unable to contribute to society, a man who couldn’t take care of his children, one of whom had spent a lot of time drawing in the dirt with a stick. Winslow’s father was frequently overtaken by periods of deep despair, leaving him pale and bed ridden. The man would lay about until a vision came to him: a demon-child made of flames, dancing in the corner of their farm house; or, a giant skeleton-horse wearing a harness of silver bells. Strengthened by the vision, Winslow’s father would return to the active world and begin again the printing of religious tracts.

The birch trees, white like leg bones, surrounded Winslow.

“Where is my illumination?” Winslow asked of the forest.

Finally, after two days alone, without food, without drink, he had his vision: a large crystal bowl full of water hung over a bonfire made of books and papers and paintings and his father’s corpse. In the bowl, a large fish, with a head of grey hair and a thick mustache swam about. The flames engulfed the bowl. The water boiled.

A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty

Armed with a new certainty, Winslow left the forest and began traveling with the Union Army’s colonel Berdan and his sharpshooters. Berdan struck Winslow as rat-like, not to be trusted. Despite the blue uniform, the epaulettes and the gold brocade, Winslow quickly saw Berdan’s true inner being: a self-righteous man of contradictions, unable to heed his own advice, probably married three times. Berdan possessed vanity. A scar on the right side of his face forced him to forever offer Winslow the left side.

Berdan was not pleased with Winslow’s presence.

“Couldn’t Harper’s have sent Brady, or Gardner?”

Berdan organized teams of men to make use of recent innovations in firearms: telescopic sights, precision-tooled rifles. Berdan’s men could hide in the trees near the front line and shoot down Confederate pickets or gunners at a range of three hundred yards. That afternoon, in an apple orchard outside Titusville, Winslow looked though one of the telescopic sights at a Confederate solider, a mere boy leading a mule towards a paddock. The ease with which Winslow could have killed this boy became a source of torment. How is this not murder? he asked himself of the sharpshooter’s trade. The sharpshooter, a man from Indiana by the name of Chubbs, took his rifle back from Winslow. The rebel boy lived that day only because Berdan had ordered Chubbs to show Winslow the basics of selecting a perch—tall trees were preferable to the low-lying trees in the orchard—rather than demonstrate the lethality of the new long-range rifles.

“It ain’t easy for us,” said Chubbs. “The rebels scan the tree tops for the tell tale puffs of smoke. We’ll take a shot and move like hell hoping to be out of the way if they return fire.”

On the way back to Berdan’s encampment, Chubbs let forth a volley of sarcastic comments about his commanding officer. Berdan will not drink to excess, is always singing the praises of vegetarianism and water cures, says accuracy will be greatly improved by sleeping with heads propped high by pillows, rich pastries and greasy foods are to be avoided as they lead to build ups of phlegm in the heart—as if pastry feasting is a big problem here!—Berdan says follow first impressions in all the affairs of life, but especially when on duty and a target is in range. Do not hesitate, boys, let God speak through you and your rifles.

“Don’t be fooled. Berdan’s face tells the true story. He’s a drunk, or a warlock, a worshipper of Satan,” said Winslow.

“Are you saying I’m a liar?” asked Chubbs.

To regain his authority, Winslow showed his latest sketch to Chubbs: the sharpshooter up in the tree, a canteen dangling from a branch, rifle aimed. All had been rendered in precise detail, but then, rapidly erased by Winslow, smearing the black of the charcoal across the paper, leaving only ghostly outlines of what had once been there. This had been the meaning of Winslow’s vision: unlearn everything, or become a boiled fish.

“That’s not me at all,” said the soldier. “You’re the liar.”

Deep in Winslow’s heart, a little voice could be heard whispering in a high-pitched voice, That’s right, Winslow. You’re the liar, a Revenant, a solider in the legion in of the undead. You have no soul. You have no heart. You are lower than the leeches that cling to the legs of cattle as they ford shallow rivers. You are as unclean as the worms and maggots that devour the flesh of the slain. You’re a load of chain hanging from the back of barge, dragging along the muddy bottom of the river, holding back the steady progress of America.

“I have had my vision,” Winslow said to the voice, the voice of his father trying to disguise his voice, trying and failing, yet again.

“You are all slick talk,” said the sharpshooter. “You draw as bad as you shave.” As a final sign of his disgust with Winslow, Chubbs tossed the drawing into the ditch by the side of the road. Later on, Winslow would redraw the picture in the conventional style and Harper’s would print it.

One evening, Winslow sat with Berdan outside the officer’s tent. Berdan never looked Winslow in the eyes when in conversation. Instead, he stared off into space, into the distance as if the enemy might be lurking there, taking aim, or even worse, as if worshippers of Shakespeare were approaching, quoting Hamlet and King Lear. Berdan had to be ready—to knock their Englishness into the dust with a blow of his fist. Berdan hated the British and saw their machinations at work back in ’58 when Oregon was a free territory. The sharpshooter’s rifles were all American made and like the rifle, Berdan favored all things free of the taint of Britishness.

“Do you know what figgy pudding is?” Winslow was not sure and Berdan tore into the answer, his cheeks reddening with a sudden fury. “It’s a British desert, yet we all sing its praises come Christmas time. ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’? Nothing but propaganda for the doomed royalty of the English. It’s one of their traditional carols.” A tone of disdain caused the vowel sounds of “traditional” to curl as if warped by decay. “Out with the British. Our Union deserves new ways of thinking. New tools like the camera. New blessings of industry like the long range rifle. New blessings of science such as phrenology and mesmerism. All of Europe is sick with rot. We will fire Chaucer bullets from the Swiss, but only rarely, if no proper American ordnance is to be had.”

The Officer and His Men

The next morning, Berdan addressed his men, reminding them of their duty to always be in fighting shape. The troops stood stock still like posts pounded into the ground, but Winslow knew, inside, the men were beginning to boil, for a man doesn’t like to be told what to do by a know-it-all.

“And the drinking shall cease,” Berdan ordered. “And, like the drinking, so shall cease the whoring. And more importantly, so shall cease the acts of onanism. You shall not cast your seed into the sandy banks by the rivers, nor into the grass of the field, nor into the blankets upon which you sleep, for such a casting of the seed is a waste and shameful act, right up there with surrender. No, men, you shall save your seed and this will be your strength. And it is this strength which will see you through the battles to come.”

Winslow didn’t understand how an occasional onasistic endeavor could be a sin. It wasn’t like Winslow tied himself up in ropes the way he’d seen some men do in the sketches of the book his older brother had shown him. Berdan continued to speechify and the men continued to stand at attention. But Winslow walked away. To see the men abused, and to be unable to stop it, made him feel weak.

That evening, Private Chubbs began to pester the other men.

“I sure never did cast my seed out for no reason. Never. Not once. Not at all. Never will. And you watch how I kill. Why I’m so full of seed and courage and what not, I could start my own regiment.”

A Letter from the Editor

Dear Mr. Homer,

H.H.

The River Shall Bring Us Home

Haunted by the high-pitched voice of his father, stuck giving Harper’s exactly what they wanted, faced with the reality that Harper’s may cease to exist by the time he returned home, (the true meaning of Hiram’s dispatch? Harper’s was doomed and the editor was now rolling about town in his wheelchair, insulting his amanuensis, spending the gold of others) despair once again engulfed Winslow. He set out to end the sadness, once and for all. He held the pomade in his hands, smeared the goop into his grey hair. He stole Chubbs’s rifle and headed to the river.

The cold water of the river barely moved, like it had nowhere else to go.

Winslow stepped into the blackness of the water, barefoot, his toes tapping at the muck of the river bottom, making sure there was something solid to plant the rest of his foot on. Silver shards of moonlight speckled the river surface and all around him, Winslow could smell the dank rot of dead leaves slowly turning into the dirt from which they had once grown. When the water came up to his belly, he stopped, checked the rifle one more time. Loaded. In his other hand he held a stick. Winslow pulled the rifle up, barrel towards his head of grey hair. He wished he’d stolen a pistol. The rifle was heavy; his arm began to grow tired and he feared the stick idea was not such a good one. What if he lost control of the gun? The bullet might only carve a ridge down the side of his head leaving him permanently maimed, scarred. What if the bullet didn’t kill him instantly and he became paralyzed in the water, sinking down into it, drowning? Worse than being devoured by tongues of fire. Worse than being a boiled fish. That wasn’t the plan at all. The plan had been press the stick with the trigger, die quick like a lightning strike and then, float away with the current. The end. No one would ever know what happened to him. He’d become an enigma. The rifle barrel was slick with oil from cleaning. Winslow didn’t think it would be right to shoot himself, quite possibly not fatally, and then drop Chubbs’s clean musket into the river where it would sink into he muck, the filth his own feet now stood in. No. A bad business all around. Winslow walked back to the sandy bank, put his boots on and walked slowly to camp. Not sure what he’d say if Chubbs asked why Winslow had gone off with his rifle. But when Winslow returned, everyone was asleep, excerpt for Berdan. From the officer’s tent came the glow of lamp light and the mumbled repetition of prayer.

News From the War

“You’ve changed,” said Winslow’s father, upon his son’s return home. “You look…”

Winslow played dumb, acting as if he had not noticed that his hair had returned to its youthful warm chestnut color; not letting on that deep inside, for the first time since his mother’s death two years ago, he felt happy, like a dairy maiden with strong arms, jumping up and down with joy in the cheese cellar because it was hot outside, and she was inside, in a safe dank place surrounded by her wonderful dairy products; like a rosy-cheeked dairy maiden with a half-bushy mustache and a pencil stuck in her hair.

The father lay in bed, staring at Winslow. “How was your journey?”

Lame pleasantries are the last refuge of a scoundrel, thought Winslow. And then, he told the old man the truth: “The tour was fine. I almost shot myself while standing in a river but then chickened out. I got paid in New York. My editor introduced me to an important gallery owner who commissioned new work. Everyone thinks that my future greatness is assured—everyone except for me. In New York, I heard a fugitive slave talk about slavery. I drew this man’s picture. While drawing, we spoke, and the man confessed that he’s not a fugitive slave at all. He’s a freeman from Ohio, but white folks treat him like a slave so he figures, to hell with it, he’ll give the white people what they want—and get paid. The man makes good money, working with the abolitionists, telling tales. White folks eat it up. But, the man’s sick of the charade. Said the man: ‘Abolitionists are the meetingest folks in America. All they wanna do is talk talk talk. I say it’sa time to get along. I’m ready to fight. Give me a gun. Give me an oath to swear to. I’m not talking about burning no one down south. I’ll shoot ‘em. But, nah, I’m not gonna go for burning.’ And there’s more: the man, after hearing me complain about my grey hair, gave me a recipe for a soap that rids the grey from all hair. I made the soap, mixed up the sulfur, bear grease, lye and brilliantine, in the washbasin of my New York hotel. And, so, here I am.”

“I am not well,” said his father. He pulled the bed cover up around his chin.

Some things never change, thought Winslow.

The next day, Winslow flipped through his sketchbook, gazing at random studies, seeking one worth developing further. Once again, the futility of communication overcame him. Soldiers have bugles to play charges, letters to fill with stories of death and disease at the front; trains bear bundles of newspaper; there’s the chatter of Morse code, and the mud-splattered courier on horseback with the urgent dispatch, and the semaphore signals of the men in the hot-air balloons. All to say what? Kill, Kill, Kill, or, It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. The tide of despair returned. Winslow pulled out his razor, to punish his mustache, the other half of his mustache, the one he’d left alone weeks ago, to grow out long and wild like a jaguar’s tail, while the other half slowly returned, like a field of wheat. Winslow paused. He began slicing the drawings, tearing apart the portraits of the men, cutting the paper into fourths. He took the chin of Barlow, placed it next to the eyes of the fake slave, topped it off with the forehead of the Sharpshooter. He kept cutting and slicing the paper until the new and better order revealed itself to him.

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In Which The Case for The House At Pooh Corner Is Made

It wasn’t until college that I read A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, suggested by a friend equally enamored by the minimalism I was reading almost exclusively at the time. The recommendation may seem an odd one, especially for those whose familiarity with Hundred Acre Wood begins and ends with the Disney adaptations. While similarities between Milne’s books and the movies do exist—each finds Pooh and friends setting out to solve some problem they’ve discovered or invented, and adventure ensues—in the original stories, the “message” or “moral” is never explicitly stated. For Milne’s characters, the discovery process is as ongoing and uncertain as growing up; every moment, every interaction—each interruption, silence, and contradiction—is significant. In making the unexceptional—eating breakfast, climbing a tree, racing twigs down a river—extraordinary, Milne asks us to believe in the possibility of doing the same, makes the meaning compelling because we are a part of it.

Where their Disney counterparts are scrubbed clean of subtlety and complication (e.g., Eeyore’s resolute fatalism traded for his affable gloominess), Milne’s characters are developed and complicated, and one’s sense of self-worth is subject to change with experience (e.g., Piglet becomes convinced of his bravery, which gives him the mettle to sacrifice his house to Eeyore and move in with Pooh). Tensions in one story arise in others, allowing the characters’ opinions of one another to change as their strengths and flaws become apparent (Eeyore’s self-ostracization, for example, which the animals stop humoring by book’s end). No character is predictable, and their actions are as likely to surprise themselves as those around them. Milne’s characters, with their fears and affectations and failings (complimented perfectly by E. H. Shepard’s iconic line drawings), are less tidy than their animated selves—which is to say, they’re more like us.

The second and final collection in Milne’s series, The House At Pooh Corner grapples with loss, most notably Christopher Robin’s leaving home for boarding school. As he’s the center of the characters’ universe, Christopher Robin growing up and away poses a significant threat. Milne hints at this impending departure throughout, building to the characters’ realization of it: “Christopher Robin was going away,” Milne begins the final story. “Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.” It’s not the only time the characters are aware of their vulnerability, but it’s the first time they are explicitly so. Both inevitable and—while still safe from it—unknowable, disillusionment is the price of growing up.

Above all else, Milne exalts imagination, which he distinguishes from education (which, in turn, he separates from intelligence), suggesting that those most capable of it are perhaps those with Very Little Brain, those who aren’t hastening their way into the adult world. Danger is ever-present in these stories, and even imagined dangers such as the Heffalump present real risks. But nothing is more perilous than the absence of creative thought—and for these characters, whether or not they’re aware of it, Christopher Robin’s loss of imagination means they’ll cease to exist.

It’s this reminder of what we’ve lost since we were Christopher Robin’s age, and at what cost, that helps ensure Milne’s stories’ relevance. What was once unique and exciting, we’ve become accustomed to; “Nothing”—as discussed by Pooh and Christopher Robin in the last story—is no longer a proper noun meaning “just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” This breakdown is natural, and it follows that fighting against it must be a conscious and constant choice. Milne reminds us of this, fittingly, in a description of nature:

“By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’ But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.”

Milne’s characters are constantly trying, sometimes succeeding, but always discovering, because they’re looking and listening for what isn’t there but could be. Taking nothing for granted, they see the world clearly, with no confusion as to what’s really important—friendship, compassion, imagination. By the time we leave these characters, they acknowledge the disappointment of reality and grieve what will be lost to it. But they remain optimistic so long as they are able—the alternative being the truly unimaginable prospect. Milne has said he didn’t write the Pooh books for children, and indeed, what we learn from these stories, children don’t need to be taught. The House At Pooh Corner reminds us that while we may have forgotten how to see the world this way, we were able to once, and can again.

Jacob Thomas Berns is an MFA fiction candidate at the University of Oregon, where he teaches composition and creative writing. He is the founding editor of the online journal Miracle Monocle.

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Turning the Page

At a glance, Abbott Awaits seems like a departure from Chris Bachelder’s previous novels. Compare each book’s subject: America is gripped by the Super Bowl-sized spectacle of a bear fighting a shark in shallow water (Bear v. Shark); Upton Sinclair repeatedly rises from the dead and is assassinated by socialism-fearing Americans (U.S.!); a college professor spends a quiet summer with his daughter and wife, waiting for the latter to bear their second child (Abbott Awaits).

One of these books is not like the others. But as it turns out, Abbott Awaits differs from Bachelder’s idiosyncratic, formally-inventive first two novels in degree more than kind. The novel is divided into three months, each day with its own brief chapter. Compared with the zany grab bag that is U.S.!— which includes Amazon.com reviews of Sinclair’s post-reanimation novels, lyrics to blues songs, and a 911 call transcript reporting a Sinclair shooting—this conceit is minimal.

But Bachelder uses this elliptical structure shrewdly. On June 25, Abbott, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter set out to see an antique tractor in a field before becoming bogged down in logistics–Abbott has dressed his daughter in winter clothes, sunblock has not been applied–and then permanently distracted. “Neighborhood children ride by on their bicycles, captivating Abbott’s daughter,” Bachelder writes. “Her naptime is looming. The tractor is an impossible dream. Nobody in Abbott’s family will see an antique tractor today, if ever” (50). On June 26, Abbott reads about the families of trapped miners on the Internet.

That’s all we hear about on those two days. But around and between these events, we can infer that Abbott is having a lazy-but-busy summer, full of time spent playing with his daughter, trips to the supermarket, and hours spent online. Bachelder tells us enough to infer what’s not there. It’s a perfect evocation of the emptiness of a long break: there’s one noteworthy thing per day, seldom more.

While the novel is essentially plotless, Bachelder draws dramatic tension from the march of days. Abbott will return to the classroom at the end of the summer. His hugely pregnant wife will have a cesarean on August 31, and thus Abbott knows exactly when his life will change. Caught between looking forward to these changes and savoring the freedom of summer, the reader feels (with Abbott) pushed and pulled, pressured to enjoy each moment while it lasts. Abbott Awaits thus sinks or swims on the strength of its individual moments. In this department, the reader is in good hands. Throughout his career, Bachelder has shown himself to be not only smart and funny as a writer, but deathly afraid of being boring. (Refer to the descriptions of his first two books, above.) His writing here is crisp, clear, and surprising.

Bachelder is also more focused on his characters than in his previous works. Here he renders Abbott precisely and at length, taking the various types his protagonist might embody—professor, husband, father—and creating a distinct individual whose observations, habits, mistakes, and small triumphs are, from one page to the next, funny, cerebral, wise, and affecting.

Two examples:

“Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. ‘Are they bad?’ she asks. ‘The gutters?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘They’re not that bad,’ he says, lying for no reason at all. She says, ‘The baby is really kicking today.’” (66)

“Abbott, sitting by his wife’s head, can see, over the drape, the eyes of the doctors above their masks. The birth feels secretive, covert. He can feel the hot air pooling in his own mask. The thing he’d like to tell all of them is Please be careful with this woman and this baby.” (176)

Bachelder writes with the apparent understanding that each page has to convince the reader, with keen observations and winning lines, to turn the next page. The accumulation of such moments, the constantly repeated stimulation of vivid descriptions, sharp insights, and perfectly drawn scenes, is the source of Abbott Awaits’ real pleasure.

Another way to think of the shift from Bachelder’s previous books is to view the difference as a matter of maturity, given the novel’s more domestic subject matter. (A single glance at Bachelder’s author bio, identifying him as a college professor with two daughters, suggests that Abbott Awaits may be a product of Bachelder’s life experience.) In contrast to the heavy notes of idealism in the first two books, Abbott’s own convictions and passions are tempered heavily by pragmatism—by his daughter’s low blood sugar-induced crying jag, but also by the humility that comes with knowing he will never reach the bottom of his marriage or have full knowledge of his wife’s every waking moment.

It’s to Bachelder’s immense credit that he makes the daily concerns of Abbott, so often centering on marriage and fatherhood, accessible to readers outside of these circumstances. Presenting a summer-long pastiche of Abbott’s insights and experiences, the ups and downs of his moods, his screw-ups and shining moments, Abbott Awaits is a novel about an individual who happens to be married, happens to be a father with another on the way. Marriage and fatherhood, here, take center stage but are no more real than the rest of life. They’re not cults one is inducted into, changing the very nature of life, but relationships one navigates constantly: frequently on the verge of screwing up, often making it up as one goes along, constantly surprised, always alive and awake.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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