Ready to Where?

Michel Houellebecq’s fifth and latest novel, The Map and the Territory (La Carte et le Territoire, 2010) opens with a description of a painting which features Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst in a hotel in Dubai with a nightscape of the city behind them seen through a bay window. It’s devilishly called Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. The protagonist of the book, the fictitious painter Jed Martin, has many more like it, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology. They are paintings that seem so close to our own world that it wouldn’t be surprising to find out they exist.

Most of the world Houellebecq creates is one we are supposed to assume is only a few years down the road, containing all the minutiae we encounter daily. Characters don’t just take planes in The Map and the Territory, but search for different carriers, weigh the price differences, and settle on Ryanair. Not only that, but the correspondence Houellebecq seeks to the real world is painstakingly meticulous, if not superfluous. We learn that Ryanair doesn’t serve Paris, but Beauvais, a nearby suburb of Paris. A description of a Mercedes digresses into a commentary on why “the global bourgeoisie had, on the whole, remained loyal” to the carmaker. It verges on an encyclopedic overflow of information; so much so that Houellebecq was forced to issue a reluctant thank you in his acknowledgement to the authors of several French Wikipedia entries. Of course, what solidifies this notion that the world being represented is indeed the world we live in is the presence of a character who is the author of Atomised, Platform, and The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq.

Despite all of the controversies from plagiarism to racism which have plagued Houellebecq’s career (which he delights in playing with in the novel), The Map and the Territory received high praise when it was published in France, winning the Prix Goncourt. The story follows the artistic career of Jed Martin, who becomes an overnight star of the art world with a series of photographs which capture interesting perspectives on Michelin’s road maps, in an exhibit titled “The Map is More Interesting than the Territory.” There are women in Martin’s life, his father, his eccentric curator, but we are led to believe that the decisive moment in Jed’s life comes when he hops on a plane to Ireland to convince the reclusive author Houellebecq to write the gallery notes to a series of paintings featuring workers in various professions, many—the narrator notes—vanishing trades. This meta-absurdity reaches its height when Martin decides he needs to paint the author in order to complete his series; he must paint an author to finalize his vision.

Thankfully, Houellebecq (the real author) never goes over the top in this playfulness, which could have easily have sunk the novel with over-indulgence. Instead, he chooses a more curious level of narration—that of a historian recounting events that happened sometime in the 2010s. It is as if the narrator has been limited by secondary sources to re-construct the story, as references are always made to how things were construed by the press and critics. The Map and the Territory would be an unquestionable success if it did not so often stray from this narration, moving in and out of Martin’s thoughts without irony or explanation.

The Map and the Territory is about what it represents. Such a remark would be dismissive of other novels and works of art, but we have to make something of the book’s title, derived from Alfred Korzybski’s observation that, “The map is not the territory.” The ingenious idea behind Martin’s photographs of maps is, of course, that they can be more interesting than the territory, in what they represent. Houellebecq is scoffing at those that say the novel is out-of-fashion, and can no longer represent such a hyper-connected world. All of those little facets, from the portraits in Irish airports to the encyclopedic knowledge of houseflies lifted from the French Wikipedia, find their way into the novel, and if they bog the story down with information then so be it. The Map and the Territory is an argument for how the novel can still represent our world, even the world we imagine is ahead of us.

Jacob Spears is a third year student in the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA Fiction program.

Didion’s Blue Period

Joan Didion is no stranger to high intensity subject matters. Her acclaimed, nearly fifty-year long career has taken her from the counter-culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district into the mind of Charles Manson, from the Black Panther movement to her childhood in California, from the battle lines of El Salvador’s civil war to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trials. Didion long ago established herself as a writer willing to actively pursue a story, yet her recent works revolve around intense subjects that, unfortunately, pursued her: the death of both her husband and only child. Didion’s newest memoir, Blue Nights follows 2006’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the author sought to process the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, amidst the first stages of her daughter’s illness. Yet, where Magical Thinking strove for a kind of resolution to grief, Blue Nights, which primarily focuses on daughter Quintana’s death due to complications from pneumonia, is more resigned, devastated, but still aiming for understanding. It is an emotionally honest confrontation of the complexities of grief and what remains for those left behind after family dies.

The work is begun by a meditation on the memoir’s title, a phrase that evokes the early summer season during which Didion’s daughter Quintana died, and also represents the book as a whole. She writes:

During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

The author is bracing her reader for what is to come. This is not a feel-good book meant to provide inspiration and comfort to others grieving: quite the opposite. This is a memoir about realizing what is gone and what still remains to be lost. It is about the “end of a promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading.” Through this first chapter Didion sets a tone of pained reflection and sadness, but also establishes that she isn’t concentrating primarily on death but more so on the life that came before it. At the chapter’s end she writes, “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” True to her word, Blue Nights spends most of its pages exploring questions of Quintana’s life rather than death, though a heavy undertone of impending tragedy tinges most reflections, especially as Didion examines her own parenting choices. She is not writing to draw her grief to a conclusion, but rather to examine its angles as one might do to a large, ugly piece of art with which they must now share their home.

From this beginning, Didion begins a looping exploration of Quintana’s childhood, the days leading to her death in a Manhattan hospital, and the author’s own experiences as an aging widow and mother left to decide what more she wants from life. A notable quality of the prose is its repetitions. Repetition was also a major feature of The Year of Magical Thinking and in both instances it represents a specific quality of grief—the need to revisit and rely on known facts, which, in the days following a tragedy, are often the only solid ground in the life of a mourner. The subject of Didion’s italicized repetitions is sometimes a long-gone moment of comfort: the echo of “Do you wanna dance. I wanna dance,” evokes again and again the tender image of Quintana as a young girl “crooning back to the eight-track.” Sometimes it brings the reader back again to times of anguish in the family: “Let me just be in the ground,” spoken by Quintana as a teenager, represents the iteration of Didion’s contemplation of her daughter’s struggles with depression. The repetition in Blue Nights isn’t just a symptom of grief but also an exercise in it—the repeated phrases intrude on the narrative, just as grief-laden thoughts intrude on the brain. Yet, in the purposeful inclusion of these phrases and their deliberate positioning, the author is able to excavate nuances that weren’t apparent in their first utterances.

Also repeated are different inquiries. Question marks speckle most pages like confetti, but they are asked in the true essence of questioning. Most often they are pressing questions pertaining to the way things might have been different or the nature of memory: “Did I get this all wrong? Did I misunderstand a key point?” She seldom answers these questions but rather lets them hang, their cumulative weight adding to the heaviness of the subject matter. The questions are what end up driving the narrative, establishing it as a vehicle for exploration without an end goal.

Blue Night’s narrative, broken up into small chapters, has a rambling quality. The chronology is vague, the scenes transition unexpectedly, and the characters sometimes come and go from the page with little more than anecdotal relevance. Yet, here again Joan Didion is using prose construction to represent the shades of grief. Towards the middle of the memoir, she invokes a phrase often said to her over recent years and writes:

You have your wonderful memories.
I do, but they blur.
They fade into one another.
They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, “all mudgy.”

Just as they do in her mind, Didion’s memories blur, fade and become “all mudgy” in Blue Nights. Such ambiguities are the nature of grief thinking and the author succeeds in relaying such psychological complexities throughout her memoir.

In a work so mired in honesty and emotional intensity, one element of Didion’s memoir seems disparately shallow: an emphasis on famous names and brands. At one point she writes,  “What became of the women smoking cigarettes in their Chanel suits and their David Webb bracelets, what became of Diana holding the champagne flute and one of Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates?” One might argue that there has always been materialism and name-dropping in Didion’s work and that such qualities are a representation of her time and social sphere, yet the presence of such pretentions is almost shocking amidst the emotionalisms that surround them. It eventually becomes apparent, however, that Didion is focusing on the celebrity-studded thing-driven elements of her earlier life consciously. By including such recollections within her grief narrative she is highlighting their irrelevancy, pointing out how much they meant then and how little they mean now. A quirk of the prose again becomes a representation of grief.

One might recommend Blue Nights with the same cautionary clauses one might use to recommend the movie Schindler’s List: it is depressing and it doesn’t provide an enjoyable experience, but it is also fascinating and moving and a valuable contribution to its subject. It is due to the emotional heft of the memoir’s themes and the skillful, nuanced manner in which they are handled that this book stands as a important addition to Didion’s life work and should be a must-read for any lover of nonfiction, student of psychology or admirer of the author. Joan Didion built her writing life out of exploring on the page what she saw and did—this book is a continuation of this creative life, a life that unfortunately did not turn out the way she had planned.

Get up.

No, seriously. Close Word (or your stick-it-to-the-man equivalent), press down the top of whatever cute Mac you’ve been toting around, and get up.

Walk away.

For the last decade I’ve been told that I must be writing every day. I have to glue my ass to the chair for an hour or 750 words or five pages or whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. This is about cultivating habits. It’s about having a quantity-over-quality writing life. It’s about staying in that damn chair until I’ve done my work for the day. It’s about how morning is better than evening (true for me, but for reasons other than bullet-point writing tips) and something is better than nothing. Etc.

I can’t work like this.

By nature, I’m a ruminator. By nature, I also do not sit still very well. Combining the two means I do my best writing while moving my body, by allowing a space for my thoughts. I am also someone who can’t process on the page. You know those people who sit there and write a few words, delete a few words, write a few words? The contemporary equivalent of the wastebasket full of balled up paper? I do all of that in my head first. For a 20-page essay, I might spend a month of morning runs going over and over each word, sentence, paragraph, page. I’ll drop the occasional note into my phone while on the stationary bike or mark the shower wall mid-shampoo. But mostly I wait and, when everything seems settled, I sit down and all that I’ve worked for just comes out. No less work than my peers, no more work either. Just a different way of getting the job done. Repeat for revision.

“That’s not really writing,” one of my students said in response to a similar method mentioned at the end of Max Beerbohm’s “Going out for a Walk.” The class called shenanigans because writing is only writing when you are in that chair. The moment when Beerbohm said he wrote the essay the reader just read — all about how he hates a purposeless walk — while on a walk broke the dream for them.

But isn’t that really writing?

When I was in grad school round two, on my way to campus, I would pass some of my classmates/friends who would work in a neighborhood coffee shop. One classmate in particular had stunning discipline over this practice. Every weekday morning it seemed, she was there. And while I’d sit at the stoplight in front of the shop, I’d see her sitting by the window, Mac open, fingers either hovering over the keys or pressed into her scalp. She looked miserable.

“How’s your manuscript going?” I’d ask when I’d see her on campus.

She had no distance, no perspective. She was toiling away at the same sections or the same sentences. Putting in a word. Taking it out. Putting it back in. “Take a break,” I said more than once. “Get some distance.”

In desperation, she’d respond, “I can’t.”

This wasn’t the can’t of hypergraphia that plagued Plath and Wallace. It was the kind of can’t that suggested even one day away from the work would allow the whole thing to unravel. It was the can’t that demands us to write every day because to not do so would show that we are not serious writers.

And what if we find out we’re not serious writers?

Writing isn’t an act of torture. Writing the right thing can be torturous at times, but if the sum total of the experience is misery, maybe writing isn’t for you.

We don’t get to admit that very often, do we? That maybe we’ve made the wrong decision or ventured down a path that’s not our best. Maybe we’re good writers, great writers, but writing just sucks. The way calculus sucks or organizing a filing cabinet sucks.

Especially for those of us who have ventured into MFA or PhD programs, we have a hard time admitting that maybe we should be editing instead of writing, marketing instead of creating. We dismiss those options as if editors and marketers aren’t incredibly valuable. (Hint: they’re incredibly valuable.) We dismiss arts administration and teaching for the sake of teaching as if those are not contributions to the greater literary community. (Hint: they are contributions to the greater literary community.) By going to school or quitting a day job or whatever, we have said to the world, or at least to banks and our families: I am a Writer.

And a writer sits down every day and does not leave that chair until the work is done.

But what if the better work is done by getting up? By walking away? Be it for this moment in a book or this moment in a career.

Think about it.

And get up.

You got this advice for free. Think about what it must feel like to pay tuition to listen to Amy Whipple in a classroom. For more questionable thoughts, visit www.amywhipple.com, amywhipple.tumblr.com, and www.twitter.com/itsamywhipple.

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The Beauty in Faults

John Green’s most recent young adult novel is a brilliant story about a 16-year-old girl named Hazel Grace Lancaster who has Stage IV thyroid cancer that has metastasized in her lungs. She wears a cannula (oxygen tubes that wrap around her ears and perch in her nose) and must drag around a green oxygen tank that she’s named Philip. Hazel was pulled out of high school soon after she was diagnosed, but obtained her GED, and is taking literature courses at a local college.  She is an avid reader, but also enjoys watching America’s Next Top Model marathons.

Hazel meets a boy named Augustus Waters while at a support group in the “literal heart of Jesus,” an area dubbed that by her support group leader, who holds meetings in the intersection of a cross-shaped church’s basement. Augustus is a 17-year-old amputee who had his right leg removed beneath his knee because of osteosarcoma (cancer of the bones). Augustus and Hazel begin a cautious flirtation and develop a mutual love for the book “An Imperial Affliction,” a novel about a girl with cancer that ends in the middle of a sentence. Augustus decides to use his “Wish” (a gift given by a group similar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation) to take Hazel, her mother, and himself to Amsterdam in order to interview the book’s reclusive author. This trip, the highlight of which is a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant, is one of the story’s last bright moments.

Within the first couple pages of the novel, Green successfully and consistently captures the voice of an intelligent teenage girl. The language is speckled with adult vocabulary that reveals Hazel’s intelligence, as well as teenaged colloquialisms such as the occasional “like,” “I know, right?” and “Oh, my God.”  In a video blog that Green posted on the novel’s release date, he explains that he used to work as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital almost twelve years ago. “Ever since then,” he said, “I’ve been trying to write a funny, honest story about it.” He succeeded with The Fault in Our Stars, which provides humor in order to ease its overall tone of heartache. For example, when Hazel tells her story to Augustus, she omits particular details. In the narration, she says, “I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.”

Although the teenaged characters are skillfully rendered, sometimes their parents come across as a bit flat, as if they’re just people to fill space and dialogue. Hazel’s mother exists mainly as a caretaker and doesn’t obtain depth until the end, when she reveals a secret. Hazel’s father displays the most emotion of all the parents and the greatest conversational depth. He cries at any moment, but then he speaks to Hazel as if she’s on the same intelligence and maturity level as he is. Between her two parents, he has the longest intellectual conversations with their daughter and takes the time to read “An Imperial Infliction” so he can discuss it with Hazel.

Conversely, Augustus’s parents do not have a defined presence until the second half of the story when Hazel spends more time with his family. However, by that point, more emphasis is placed upon his older, married sisters, who have rambunctious children, than his parents. This lack of characterization could be because the story isn’t about how cancer affects a family, but how it affects a teenager’s life. The story is told through Hazel’s point of view, so naturally we see only what catches her attention. Hazel’s thoughts largely focus on her condition, and her friends and their conditions.

But The Fault in Our Stars is not just a cancer book. It’s also a story about two nerds who fall in love and help each other through their pain—pain that Green portrays with honesty. It is evident that he did extensive research on childhood cancer. He doesn’t sugarcoat details or emotions, and his metaphors are powerful, as in a scene before Augustus tells Hazel that he’s taking her to Amsterdam. The two are picnicking in a park behind a museum. Nearby is a skeleton sculpture that children use as a playground. During their picnic, Augustus comments on the sculpture.

“Two things I love about this sculpture,” he says. “First, the bones are just far enough apart that if you’re a kid, you cannot resist the urge to jump between them. Like, you just have to jump from rib cage to skull. Which means that, second, the sculpture essentially forces children to play on bones. The symbolic resonances are endless, Hazel Grace.”

This is a powerful moment that illustrates how close children are to death: the children on the bones, Hazel and Augustus’s proximity to those children, and the fact that Hazel and Augustus are still children who are not in remission.

Green’s writing style does not insult a teenager’s intelligence. The language is rich and the points of conflict are not stereotyped but instead feel unique to these characters. This book transcends the “YA” categorization because it is a story that both teenagers and adults would enjoy. It is a lesson about cancer as much as it’s a lesson about love, family, friends, and survival.

The Fault in Our Stars jabs a barbed hook into its readers’ hearts, twists it, and leaves it as a reminder of the ache it caused.

Nicole Bartley is a second-year master’s candidate at Chatham University for fiction with a publishing concentration. She is also an escape artist. Her specialties include writing and reading science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, contemporary fiction, and young adult. 

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Poetry, Really

In 1990 Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End became the first (and, thus far, only) collection of prose poems to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a decision that set off a firestorm of controversy amongst genre purists. Despite the widely acknowledged, non-lineated work of such lofty predecessors as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein, the taxonomic controversy over Simic’s work continued. Residual grumblings can still be heard today: “Is it really poetry?”

Suffice to say, if you enjoy nothing more than a nice long romp in formalism, this book is not for you. But if you are able to shelve your Pulitzer issues and genre boundaries, this book may prove a welcome, challenging surprise. Don’t be deceived by the slimness of the volume or the small, untitled rectangles of text suspended on each page. This is a book which, like the nature of prose poetry itself, thrives on contradictory elements. Despite the implied intimacy of the work’s size, The World Doesn’t End is significant in scope, spanning from the old world, populated by gypsies and dancing dogs, to a modern era of all-consuming objects, cluttered with TVs and blank canvases entitled “Blank.”

Amongst the most moving pieces is the book’s opening poem, which acts as a genesis story, fusing the dark aura of a war-torn childhood (“My mother was a braid of black smoke/she bore me swaddled over burning cities) with a perverted primordial skyscape (“the high heavens were full of little shrunken dead ears instead of stars”). Imbued with a proverbial biblical quality, this piece sets the stage for a series of familiar, yet hopelessly skewed events. Make way for surrealistic appearances by Jesus and the ever-weeping Mary Magdalene. Prepare for a woman applying blood as if it were lipstick, using a severed thumb. Watch a man descend a ladder while holding his own disembodied head.

As fantastical as this opening poem is, it’s difficult not to read it as Simic’s reflection on his own youth. He was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Serbia (then Yugoslavia), where he remained throughout childhood, enduring World War II. In 1954, he immigrated to Chicago, and later spent time in New York, instances which are also chronicled in the book. These autobiographical tidbits seem to crop up exactly when we are most desperate for a moment of clarity, serving as anchors to adjacent events which are far more fantastical (“Margaret was copying a recipe for ‘saints roasted with onions’”), muddied by myth (“…Hermes showed up. He was not much to look at”) and often puzzling (“The rat kept lovebirds”). The strategic placement of such bursts of realism manages to fill the entire book with the sense that this really happened. The result is a startling, unnerving effect which both consumes readers in an alternate reality and reminds them of their own gullibility.

Many of these elements feel like the stuff of prose fiction: a temporal trajectory from childhood to adulthood, the creation of another world, the entrance and exit of characters. So what makes it poetry?  Consider Simic’s own defense: ”What makes them poems is that they are self-contained, and once you read one you have to go back and start reading it again. That’s what a poem does.”* If one agrees with this definition, then one must agree that these are indeed poems. Their folkloric, riddling quality can be as frustrating as it is addicting, a characteristic found in such other Serbian poets as the phenomenal Vasko Popa (whom Simic has translated).

If you read The World Doesn’t End (which you should) and still feel inclined to argue about the nature of Simic’s poetry, just be aware that you are going up against someone who has won the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the P.E.N. Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal in addition to the Pulitzer. In summary: a literary giant. This is not to say that one man can decide what poetry is and is not. But I’d still be nervous to have him at my dinner table.

*From “The Smiles and Chills in the Poetry of Charles Simic”, NY Times, May 28, 1990

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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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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Powers of Attraction

Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive offers an illustrated history of Pierre and Marie Curie, whose partnership and research changed the world—for better and for worse. This 2011 National Book Award finalist cannot be called a picture book, though, or even a book with pictures. The former suggests something suitable for young children, and though its cover and spine glow in the dark, Radioactive wouldn’t work well as a bedtime story. Yet, “a book with pictures” isn’t quite right either, because the images are not subordinate to the text; to the contrary, they’re absolutely vital to the narrative’s success. The most pleasing term I’ve found to describe Radioactive—from sources ranging from The New York Times to NPR to Vogue—is a “visual” or “graphic” biography.

Redniss dedicates the first part of her book to the Curies’ lives prior to their discovery of radioactivity. We learn about Pierre and Marie’s upbringings, early romances, and eventual meeting in a Paris laboratory. Redniss quotes the Curies at length, selecting and arranging their words to allow these two long-deceased lovers to tell their story. The overlapping dialogue provides a vivid portrait of a relationship built not only upon love, but upon a shared passion for science:

MARIE: “He caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and asked me to share that life.”

PIERRE: “It would, nevertheless, be a fine thing . . . to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams, your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.”

The second part of Radioactive occupies nearly four times as many pages as the first. It concerns the repercussions of the Curies’ research and the latter half of their relationship, which ends tragically with Pierre’s death. As one may expect, this marks a significant shift in the book. Suddenly, Marie is left to juggle multiple roles alone: mother, professor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Her later research and subsequent affair with another scientist—and interestingly, the work and relationships of her children—occupy significant space in the latter part of the narrative.

Throughout the book, Redniss’s own writing style takes a backseat to story. Her straightforward voice mingles with those of her subjects, a pleasant contrast to the lyrical quality of the quotes:

After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

MARIE: “I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress.”

With the constant companionship that accompanied their research, the Curies’ love deepened. They cosigned their published findings. Their handwritings intermingle in their notebooks. On the cover of one black canvas laboratory log, the initials ‘M’ and ‘P’ are scripted one atop the other.

Aside from directly chronicling the Curies’ history, Redniss relates radioactivity to period developments such as the X-ray, spiritualism, and Art Nouveau. She also makes frequent leaps forward in time to visit the contemporary uses (and misuses) of radiation: a boy being treated for cancer, the bombing of Hiroshima, the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the technology needed to protect and dispose of nuclear materials. The majority of these cutaways worked quite well, though some felt a little too abrupt and even tedious compared to the main plotline.

And amidst all of this, supporting and enhancing the narrative, is the art. Redniss’s drawings are unearthly, eye-catching, and faintly grotesque. This is “a tale of love and fallout,” after all, so the oversized eyes and curving limbs and strangely delicate hands suit Radioactive’s inherent strangeness. Redniss also used a process called “cyanotyping” to give some of the images a beautifully surreal, luminous appearance, like a negative image lit from beneath. Yet, I often stopped reading to wonder: “Who is that man, and why does he have three eyes, two noses, and two mouths? What is this mass of green and yellow meant to signify? . . . And why is that person suddenly naked?”

Color, text placement/shape, and the use of empty space also affect the reading experience in Radioactive. In the black and while illustrations at the beginning of the book, Pierre’s story occupies the left-hand pages, while Marie’s occupies the right. When they meet, this pattern starts to dissolve; their quotes are placed on the same pages, and they begin appearing in color illustrations together. This is a clever gesture to how Pierre and Marie’s lives ran parallel to one another before finally veering into a relationship.  And the chapter’s name? “Symmetry.”

While much of Radioactive is illustrated by Redniss’s own hand, she also includes copies of historical documents and photographs. More of the latter would have been a welcome addition to this book, as there are only three realistic renderings of Marie in the book, and none of Pierre. (While the book’s subtitle gives them equal billing, Radioactive offers more attention to Mme. Curie. Every chapter opens with a quote from her; two pages are dedicated to listing “luminaries, flora and fauna” of Poland, her homeland; she is the one illustrated on the cover. This imbalance isn’t too much of a problem, as Marie’s experiences are textured enough to fill these rich pages.)

Page by page, this book confronts traditional notions of what nonfiction “should be” and what the form can accomplish. By challenging the boundaries of its medium, Radioactive doesn’t just leave its reader looking forward to Redniss’s future material, but also the works that it might inspire other artists to create—a fitting outcome for a story about discovery and transformation.

Maria Sholtis is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter here.

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On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

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