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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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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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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“Inherited Fears and Real Dangers: Being Visible as a Woman Writer”

All I needed was a decent copy of Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” I found several online, all excerpts, and when I combed the digital archives made available to me through the university where I teach, I found The New York Times Magazine backlog stopped just short of the issue in which it first appeared (December 5, 1976).

I wanted to use “Why I Write” as a companion piece to “On Keeping a Notebook.” My summer composition course began in less than two weeks, and I wanted to teach these two pieces. I wanted to start a conversation about freedom, about writing as a means to express perspective, memory, and, in the case of “Why I Write,” as a vehicle for uncovering thoughts and ideas.

I finally stumbled across the essay in an anthology called The Writer and Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-century American Writers. I ordered it, and it arrived several days later. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks until I was tired: of reading student papers; of staring at blank screens, waiting for my own words to appear; of trying to be wife and mother a hundred miles from my home, my heart; of questioning myself, wondering what the hell it was that made me think that, at middle age, I should be, in my mother’s terms, gallivanting, shrugging my responsibilities in favor of pursuing what I want, what I’m driven to do, not what’s good for everyone else. Woman, take up thy cross.

I picked up Writer and Her Work and began reading. Janet Sternburg collected these seventeen essays (nineteen, actually, as the second issue includes an essay-length preface by Julia Alvarez and a second introduction-in-miniature by Sternburg) because, she says, “we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.” I don’t know if, in the intervening thirty years since its initial publication, ten years since its reissue, that statement still holds true—we women writers today seem much less reluctant to commit our process to the page—but the value of these women writing of their craft and their writing lives in the decades that feminists’ heralded the cracking and crashing of glass ceilings everywhere, it’s comforting for this woman writer to know my own insecurities, my fears, my occasional sense of isolation is not a regression or a betrayal of my sisters who’ve come before me.

Sternburg set criteria for this essay collection: First, they must be written by American writers (her rationale: “to ‘go abroad’ would scatter the impact of our own experience.”). Second, they must represent “many different kinds of writers, especially those who have worked in more than one literary form.” Third, the backgrounds of these women must be diverse, while at the same time “suggest what women writers have in common.”

Sternburg solicited and received material from Mary Gordon, Nancy Milford, Margaret Walker, Susan Griffin, Ingrid Bengis, Toni Dade Bambara, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Burroway, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gail Godwin. Among them are novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, essayists, literary critics, memoirists, feminist and Womanist critics, documentarians, and authors of children’s books.

They are recipients of many awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Emmy and many others.

Julia Alvarez, in her preface to the updated edition, calls the book, “a liberating text for so many women writers who, like me, felt isolated and afraid.” Isolated and afraid? Check. I had to keep reading.

Anne Tyler addresses the Woman-Having-It-All Syndrome in her essay, a condition that began developing among independent-minded women sometime in the mid-sixties, morphed several times over the intervening decades, has been disputed, disproved, redefined, and, lately, appropriated in the most twisted sort of way by certain far-right conservatives [halting now my derisive tangent]. Tyler’s recounts the many intrusions into the writing life and brings a reader like me, one who “always did count on having a husband and children” back down to earth. She offers hope, says, “I’m surprised to find myself a writer but have fitted it in fairly well, I think.”

Not what you’re looking for? Then turn to Alice Walker, who begins her essay by answering the question about women artists and motherhood—you know, that one that implies we can be only one or the other, so what’s it going to be? She says: “Yes….[women artists] should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one….Because with one you can move….With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” (Is that what I am, as a mother of four? A sitting duck? Hmm.) This is not to say that Walker maintains for nearly twenty pages a discussion limited to this one narrow (narrow?) consideration. No, she expands, blossoms, even, from womanhood to black womanhood, to criticism and representation (nonrepresentation?) of black women artists in feminist thought. She covers a lot of ground, ending, just prior to her closing poem, with the words: “We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.” It’s worth the read to discover on one’s own what comes between.

Michele Murray’s[1] essay, entitled “Creating Oneself from Scratch,” resonated most strongly with me. It is a posthumous creation, comprised of selections from her diaries and covers a twenty-year period where she contemplates writing, motherhood, the agonies of motherhood in relation to her writing, and, the motivating force—cancer—that drove her on, in spite of the challenges of raising four children, to produce four books, two children’s books, an anthology of women’s literature (her bio mentions it being one of the first of its kind), and a book of poetry prior to her death. She yearned to live long enough to see the publication of the last, The Great Mother, her poetry collection. She died seven months too soon. It makes me wonder at we women artists, especially those of us for whom prominent identifying labels often shift, one day more mother than writer, another more writer than any incidental markers of DNA. What would we do, what would we produce, knowing our time is limited? How would we shift our time, how would we choose our priorities, what would we leave for our daughters, our sisters, what words of wisdom or folly would we commit to the page, not leave to chance and stardust?

My recommendation? If you’re a writer, pick up this book. If you’re a woman writer, pick it up and don’t put it down. Hold it close to you. Create.

Jody Lucas Kulakowski is current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about pain and spirituality, motherhood and rural womanhood, growing and dying. She lives between Pittsburgh and her home in Punxsutawney, where she much prefers peacocks to groundhogs.

When a novel begins with the opening line of “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” you know you’re in store for a bleak take on the world. But that’s to be expected from Richard Yates, the voice of the postwar age of anxiety made fashionable again thanks to the film adaptation of his first book, the heartbreaking Revolutionary Road. The Easter Parade is his fourth novel and the book that rescued his career for very good reason. Here, Yates shows a good deal of growth as he chronicles the lives of the Grimes sisters for forty desperate years in the intellectual wastelands of New York City.

Yates’ vision is unflinching, uncomfortable and unsettling. Emily, the younger sister, is the protagonist of the book who we follow through her humble beginnings and her quest to become a bohemian. Along the way she indulges in meaningless relationship after meaningless relationship, all the way while comprehending nothing about life. “She often said ‘I see’ about things she didn’t wholly understand,” Yates writes of her, and it’s a phrase Emily uses constantly throughout the entire novel. Emily ends up alone and miserable, and her sister doesn’t fare much better. Yates wisely juxtaposes “the original liberated woman” with her sister Sarah who marries a “limited man, and in many ways an ignorant man.” Her domesticated life falls apart in a crumbling countryside manor while her husband beats her and discourages her from partaking in any form of outside life, even one of the mind.

Although The Easter Parade is a breathtaking portrait of two women’s lives following World War II, it does feel dated in places thanks to Yates’ occasional cheap shots at feminism. When Emily is completely alone and at her wit’s end, she meets a woman who runs a “female masturbation clinic” and a scene ensues in which Yates brutally mocks the early stages of women’s lib. But despite the fact that a few scenes and themes have aged badly in the thirty years since The Easter Parade’s publication, what’s truly startling is how contemporary the majority of the book still feels. At its heart, Yates’ fourth novel deals with human beings searching for happiness when there are only limited options available to them. In this sleek volume he examines the pros and cons of not only married life but that of the intellectual as well, and what he discovers is alarming not only because of the pointlessness of it all, but also because of Yates’ deeply nihilist bent. The Yates mantra, as spoken through Emily Grimes, is as simple as it is chilling: “Yes, I’m tried. And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
(Little, Brown and Company/August 2008)
Alexandra Rae Valint

Vampires are cool again. Of course, to we steadfast lovers of the bloodsucking mythical creatures, vampires have always been cool: stealthy, seductive, and inexhaustible metaphors for sex, empire, death, and desire. However, vampires have not always been as sexy as they are now, and as they undeniably are in Stephenie Meyer’s cultishly popular Twilight Saga, the finale of which came out on August 2.

Edward Cullen, our vampire hero and star-crossed love of our human heroine, Bella Swan, is perfection: a chiseled, cold, god-like body paired with an enviable IQ. He’s a guy’s guy who plays baseball and loves fast cars, but he’s also the type of guy you bring home to your parents, who opens doors for you and lovingly records you a CD of songs he’s composed for you on his piano (which, by the way, he’s kind of a prodigy at). Oh, and he’s totally okay with just kissing. He’s inspired a legion of loyal fans who endlessly extoll his flawlessness. He’s nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who for all his manipulative magnetism always aroused equal amounts desire and repulsion. Neither was Dracula quite the same brooding, tortured type that the vampire has become in today’s fang-friendly pop culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s resident vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, brooded with a stern, apprehensive face and morose eyes for three seasons before broodingly departing (at night, in shadow, without a word) to spin-off show Angel, where he brooded successfully for many more seasons. The recently aired (and cancelled) CBS series Moonlight starred another brooding vampire with a conscience who was, again, in love with a feisty blonde mortal. Such TV series have continued the trend towards the humanization and sexification of the vampire, along with the concomitant lessening of the danger and violence associated with the vampire’s demonic desires. Those sickly anemic looks, pointy fangs, and unwilling neck-scarred human victims have become stunning paleness, a set of perfect teeth, and a jug of extra blood from the hospital or leftover from the butcher’s shop. The vampire has increasingly become the repository for our hopes and anxieties about the human status as hero/victim: trapped within an everlasting yet bloodless and therefore blood-lusting body, the vampire struggles above his demon—his own self—to be “good,” “selfless,” and as “normal” as possible. The vampire has come to represent the human situation. Edward Cullen embodies this paradigm to the hilt, desperately trying to be good and moral in every way still open to him.

Clearly, there is nothing new about vampire lit. After Stoker and Polidori, Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (the basis for HBO’s fall series True Blood) followed. But no other vampire lit, to my knowledge, has caused this kind of frenzied, impassioned ferment. Witness: bookstores sponsor nationwide midnight release parties a la Harry Potter; a high school girl band, The Bella Cullen Project, gets their Twilight-inspired compositions distributed on iTunes (I recommend “Switzerland”); I’m up reading wide-eyed until 4 a.m., only to finally go to sleep and dream about the characters, only to wake up and write an acoustic-folk song with my sister (also a fan), only to then brag about said song to all my friends, who one-by-one I have converted to the series (my book conversion rate has never been higher).

To the still un-converted, the premise of the series is fairly simple: Bella Swan, our narrator, moves to Forks, a sleepy, rainy city in Washington State. Her first day at school, as she gazes across the abyss of the cafeteria, she locks eyes with a handsome pale boy sitting with other beautiful pale people (his adopted vampire family). Indescribable attraction and inevitable love ensue, even when she discovers he’s a vampire and even after he confesses that he must restrain himself from biting her because her blood is pretty much the best smelling liquid in the beverage store. Various threats to their love/life occur in the first three books, and through it all Bella desperately yearns to be turned into a vampire so she can live with Edward for ever and ever. The arrival of the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, had the Twilight universe atwitter. Would Bella go through with the wedding? Would she become a vampire? Would Jacob (Bella’s best friend and a werewolf) imprint? Would Bella and Edward have sex? When August 2 arrived, and I cracked open the hefty hardback, I nearly read the 754 pages in one sitting.

Twists and surprises and answers to the aforementioned pressing questions make it almost impossible to talk about the book beyond page 25. However, from my investigation into the massive online response, Breaking Dawn has been met with more resistance and less unconditional glee than the previous three books received. Of course, a beloved series’ final book will never be met with hugs and kisses from everyone, and the book does take a distinct turn in subject matter, narrative structure, tone, and mood. The book feels more adult and less young adult, and perhaps that’s why some of the young fan base feels a bit alienated and betrayed. The book is no longer concerned with proving Edward and Bella’s love, but rather with handling the crises that come after love is assured. Such a maturation was to be expected; Bella leaves high school and parents behind, and she ventures into the unknown terrains of marriage and vampire existence (comically, the first causes her much more dread than the second). Even Meyer’s oftentimes inflated, indulgent prose feels more controlled, descriptively tighter here; she spends less time, though still a lot of time, expressing mushy love and describing steamy kisses and instead takes both the mushiness and steaminess of Edward and Bella’s relationship for granted (although the cold planes of Edward’s chest still receive an undue amount of attention).

Meyer is writing a different kind of book in Breaking Dawn: not girl gets boy, or girl gets boy back, or girl gets stuck in a classic love triangle. Breaking Dawn’s winding plot is harder to stereotype as frothy teen fantasy romance when it’s mostly preoccupied with the reasons we form the families we do and the ways we keep them from disintegrating. Thematically, the books have always emphasized choice and sacrifice (ironically within a framework of destiny), but yet again, such topics have matured and broadened in this final book. Breaking Dawn’s climactic showdown, a more psychological and nuanced battle than the one in Eclipse, features relevant questions about power, war, corruption, and the necessity of resisting the politics of fear.

I have spent a lot of time wondering why these books are so gosh-darn popular. Certainly, there is the refreshing, yet endearingly sexy, abstinence of Bella and Edward and the drug and alcohol free high school scene, both which makes the world of Gossip Girl a drunken and stoned red-light district by comparison. Of course, there is the grand, love-at-first-sight, fated passion between Bella and Edward, a soul mate scenario which invokes Juliet and Romeo and Cathy and Heathcliff (Bella and Edward actually quote from Wuthering Heights to express their mutual infatuation). But, I think, at the heart of readers’ intense investment in the series is that Bella, a seemingly ordinary girl who doesn’t fit in in “this world,” whose life in “this world” is defined by mind-numbing mediocrity, has another viable option; she has an escape.

And here is the core fantasy behind the series: not that an average looking girl instantaneously mesmerizes a beautiful and brilliant supernatural being (although that is another fantasy), but that she possesses something special and inherent that makes her belong more to that other world, the glamorous supernatural realm, than to this mundane world of cafeteria lunches and graduation thank you cards. Of course, when Bella bemoans her life of mediocrity she also reveals her own, distinctly not-average strengths: her incredible bravery, loyalty, and ability to notice that an important letter is written, crucially, on a page torn from her copy of The Merchant of Venice. Despite her clumsiness and her human need for food and sleep, she’s always possessed a “superpower.” Although Edward’s superpower is the ability to read everyone’s mind, Bella’s mind has consistently been a closed book to him (it aggravates him; delights her). Bella’s mind is a fortress of sorts, defended by steely resolve and a wry individualism. Breaking Dawn satisfyingly follows this potential in ways that, again, I can do no more than hint at. Bella’s mind becomes her ultimate strength and her ultimate gift—a capitulation proving that an intelligent girl is always already a superhero.