by Richard Powers
464pp
Picador, 2007
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Karin Schluter has survived a conservative religious upbringing (her late mother used “the Living Scriptures volume like a Magic 8 Ball”) and now works in consumer relations for a computer company in her native Nebraska. Her hard-won stability is shattered when her brother, Mark, suffers a near fatal car accident. Mark survives, but his recovery requires significant physical, cerebral, and emotional rehabilitation. But therapy fails to treat the one effect of the accident that is most troubling for Karin—Mark fails to recognize her and believes that she has been hired to replace the “real” Karin as part of a shadowy and ever-widening conspiracy.

Desperate for answers, Karin takes a long shot and contacts Dr. Gerald Weber, a respected neuroscientist who has written several popular books in the vein of Oliver Sacks: “[Weber’s] accounts revealed the brain’s mind-boggling plasticity and neurology’s endless ignorance. He wrote in a modest voice and ordinary style that placed more faith in individuals’ stories than in prevailing medical wisdom.” Weber’s interest is piqued when he learns that Mark may be suffering from a disorder known as Capgras syndrome, “one of a family of misidentification delusions” which has never before been induced by accidental head trauma. As Weber struggles to help his increasingly paranoid patient, the married doctor makes an unlikely and intense connection with Barbara Gillespie, a nurse’s aide and one of the few people that Mark actually trusts during his long and difficult recovery. The more Weber fails to heal Mark and console Karin, the more he confronts the unsettling possibility that he is a lightweight and a charlatan: “He was just a popularize. An exploitative popularize, at that.” Meanwhile, Karin escapes into the arms of Daniel Riegel, an environmentalist caught in his own struggle to preserve the local crane habitat from unscrupulous development.

As if this weren’t enough of a narrative juggling act, Powers is very clear about the omnipresent but obliquely referenced national events that serve as his novel’s backdrop. Weber, on the way to meet his editor, contemplates the strangely altered Manhattan skyline of May 2002: “The shadows were all wrong: still disorienting, more than eight months on. A patch of sky where there should be none.” Much of the novel occurs in the aftermath of September 11, concluding just as Operation Iraqi Freedom begins. The parallels drawn between the embattled Homeland and Weber’s latest case are as tragically revealing as they are satirically shrewd:

What did Mark suppose was being covered up? Worse: What made him think he could trust Weber? As a rule, Weber never humored patients’ delusions. Yet he humored everyone else, every day of the week. The Pakistani cabbie on the way to LaGuardia, with his theories about Al Qaeda links to the White House. The security agent at the airport, making him remove his belt and shoes. The woman in the plane seat next to him who grabbed his arm at takeoff, sure the cabin would explode at fifteen hundred feet. Humoring Mark was status quo.

Having reached the conclusion of this sprawling, elliptical narrative, one may share the response of Bonnie Travis—a friend and caretaker of Mark’s—after she encounters one of Weber’s books. Bonnie panics at the idea that religious faith is just another trick of the limited human brain. “One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. ‘There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?’ ” Powers refuses to reduce the human condition to contingent physical process or easy redemption. His vision in The Echo Maker is alternately cold and compassionate, an ultimately humane vision reflecting the species that inspires it.

by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
336pp
Anchor Books, 2007
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Technically, Julia McWilliams was born in California to wealthy conservatives. She was enrolled at Smith College at birth, tried everything from creative writing and basketball to handling top secret files during World War II for the OSS (precursor to the CIA). Government work lead her to Paul Child, 10 years her senior, liberal and worldly. His post-war position had them move to France. As Child tells us, “I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty six year old, rather loud and unserious Californian. The sight of France in my porthole was like a giant question mark.” But it would only take mere hours for Julia Child to find every answer. It all began with her first meal.

Her American sensibilities were on alert during that first lunch: wine with lunch? In the middle of the day? Paul, fluent in French, the customs, and the wine, reassured her. I won’t describe the meal – every sumptuous detail that urges you to book a ticket to France and oblige your taste buds. You must read it for yourself, along with every other delicious description she offers in her memoir. To her, this first lunch “was the most exciting meal of my life.”

As the French already knew and Julia discovered, the food was not just to be eaten – it was to be experienced. She immediately learned the language, made life-long friends, and began classes at the Cordon Bleu. Soon she finds herself in a famous French department store drooling over a giant mortar and pestle the way other wives crave jewelry.

The best was to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food – the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.

Paul, her soul-mate for 50 years until his death, only encouraged her to heed the culinary call. My Life shows how history is made by passionate people.

My Life in France was not meant to be a comprehensive view of Child’s entire life, just from age 36 on. In many ways My Life fits the bildungsroman category perfectly. One could say this time period was Julia Child came of age, found herself, when her life really began.

An abundance of facts, details and side stories are told in such a slim book. Here you will learn how Mastering came to be co-written with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (Simca, to her friends). How McCartheyism lead to Paul’s retirement and disillusionment with the U.S. government. There’s some insight into Julia’s rocky relationship with her father, who had wanted a quiet, submissive American daughter, not an opinionated career giant. The recounting of language errors will have you laughing out loud. It’s odd to discover that the first TV celebrity chef had only seen a television set a few times in her life before the box made her famous. The book also provides many photos from all areas of France, stages of cooking and dining, their first apartment, even the first kitchen where she mastered it all (if she could whip up perfect meals in such an archaic space, our 21st century kitchens should be pushing out regular feasts).

Although the book was written by Alex Prud’homme (Paul’s great-nephew), My Life is pure Julia – her words, her emotions, her spontaneous expressions: “Phooey!” “Ouf!” “Bravo!” Prud’homme began frequently visiting Child when she was in her early 90’s, after Paul died. My Life in France is the result of their afternoons together in her garden, as she recounted the adventurous, happy life she had led since first going to France.

Bon Appetit!

by David Treuer
336pp
Vintage, 2008
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It would be tempting to apply such a backhanded compliment to David Treuer’s latest novel. The Translation of Dr. Apelles channels Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Borges’ Labyrinths, and Kafka’s anti-parables to tell the story of Dr. Apelles, a “mere translator […] of languages that have ceased to matter to most people.” Apelles, who lives a solitary life shelving books and translating Native American languages, stumbles upon a manuscript that tells the story of Bimaadiz and Eta, two Indian youths whose growing love for one another is threatened by a series of dramatic misadventures. When he compares his own life to the characters coming to life through his translation, Apelles ruminates on its emotional poverty:

If he died then and there (by the release of poison gas in the archive’s ventilation system), no one would understand his shirts and his four slacks, the importance of his toaster or the wonderful comfort of his bed; no one would hear or understand, much less cherish, his singular and heretofore solitary morning sigh. If he were to die (a heart attack was not out of the question), he would die as languages do: with no one left in this world to speak him.

The rest of the novel, at least apparently, alternates between sections of the found manuscript and Apelles’ attempts to make up for lost time. By the conclusion, Treuer insinuates a possibility that significantly changes the way each layer relates to the other.

It would be a mistake to separate these elements—one a more conventional adventure story, the other a series of meditations on the art and purpose of storytelling. Treuer intentionally puts these very different narratives in dialogue to reveal how stories are both expressions of and limits to their subject matter. To the reader who wishes he had stayed with the more sympathetic tale of Bimaadiz and Eta, he responds implicitly with Apelles’ own struggle as an Indian to define and tell a story for himself: “if he told it in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons it would cease to be real, it would no longer be his life because it would become a story like all the other stories about his people, and if he told it he would only become a character in that story and would be only the Indian they knew and the Indian they told their friends about.” The character’s dilemma is embodied in his relationship with Campaspe, a young co-worker, who longs to learn more about Apelles, a desire for revelation that is portrayed more as violation: “she longed to lift his cover and read him, to bring him home and read him immediately and completely, and, ultimately, to shelve him in her most private and intimate stacks in her warm, cozy, red-hued apartment.”

Late in the novel, Apelles thinks, “What could he say that would exist on its own, that represented only him and his life?” The Translation of Dr. Apelles is an ambivalent answer to this central question. If story is what the reader brings to the table, with all of its literary and cultural conventions and expectations, story is also a place—perhaps the only place—where such barriers can truly be broken.

by the Editors of McSweeney’s
180pp
Vintage Books, 2008
$13.00 McSweeney's website Buy the Book

Read this book. It’s hilarious.

You don’t need to know a struggling writer, or the history of publishing, or a lot about Kafka to harrumph your way through the reading. Just take a look at some of the titles:

• A Serial Killer Explains the Distinctions Between Literary Terms (Charlie Anders)
• Frank McCourt’s American History Class: Course Syllabus (Derrick Martin)
• Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican (John Kennan)
• Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim (Alex St. Andrews)
• Possible Reasons My Short Stories are so Poorly Reviewed by the Other Members of My Writers’ Workshop (Jared Young)

Many times, the idea of a joke is funnier than the actual articulation of the joke. Not true for this collection. The titles alone are killer, but in almost every treatment, the sharply written, crazily imagined, breakneck pace of the pieces satisfy. If you think the idea of an “Unpublished Coda to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird” (Tim Carvell) merits a laugh, then you’ll be gratified by how the brilliantly imagined, seriously entertained idea gathers momentum. Here’s a quick snip:

“Atticus had long maintained that it was a sin to kill any animal whose sole purpose was to provide delight – his favorite example being the mockingbird. The rest, of course, were fair game. In the months since he had retired from the practice of law and taken the job of zookeeper, Atticus was putting that principle into action. He had killed eight pheasants, a giraffe, two chimpanzees, six porcupines, all the reptiles, and more blue jays than you could shake a stick at.”

While there is no discernible organization to the book – each funny piece comes after another without announcement – the general idea is that these writers use authors, characters, literary agents, and the writers’ workshop for their inspiration. Lions of the Literary Canon are fair and funny game, with James Joyce being evoked in three pieces worthy of their titles: “Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged TOEFL Teacher” (Rob Curran) is a dialogue play with Joyce leading a Berlitz-style English class. “Postcards from James Joyce to His Brother Stan” (Martin Bihl) posits Joyce in Italy, where he wise-cracks on various states of his blindness. My favorite is “Feedback from James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to his Creative-Writing Workshop” (Teddy Wayne) because…you know. “Show how these characters process memory, language, abstractions, and the urban landscape through stream of consciousness, don’t just tell us.”

For anyone who has been through either a writing program, from an MFA to a neighborhood workshop, the selections gathered in the book should deflate the blowhards and allow some air back into the room at your next class or meeting. Point out a couple of suggestions from “Thirteen Writing Prompts” (Dan Wiencek) to help get the ball rolling:

2. Write a short scene set at a lake, with trees and shit.

6. Imagine if your favorite character from nineteenth century fiction had been born without thumbs. Then write a short story about them winning the lottery.

8. A husband and wife are meeting in a restaurant to finalize the terms of their impending divorce. Write the scene from the point of view of a busboy snorting cocaine in the restroom.

Finally, good luck getting the book. It’s not coming out until April 2008; actually, April 1, 2008. That’s not a joke.

I apologize right now to all the great writers in the Joke Book of Book Jokes if I’m taking their brilliant work and making it sound like corned beef hash. You try writing this review with a straight face.

by Megan Abbott
180pp
Simon & Schuster, 2007
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It’s 1955, and the twenty two year old nameless narrator (hereon referred to by me as She/Her) lives at home with her working class father and attends secretarial school in the mornings. Understandably, She needs more from life. Working nights doing the accounting at a small time club is a good rebellious start. The excitement wears off when she realizes that, just like any other office, the boss’s bed is the only way to a raise or a promotion. Enter underworld Queenpin Gloria Denton. A well-known figure since the time of Bugsy Siegel, seedy myths and notorious truths surround this made woman. But Dernton is “no one’s wife… And she’s no one’s moll, never was… She’s on the inside. She’s one of them. They trust her. She’s been around forever.” Our narrator makes the perfect protégé.

The first meeting serves as an audition of sorts for Her. When Denton comes upon Her padding a phony set of books for the bosses, She keeps her cool and her mouth shut. Denton gives the bosses payback, and Her a job.

At first there are no risks, just a free car, apartment, clothes, and above all, a glamorous, independent life. All She has to do it collect at the casinos, make deliveries and pick-ups, and pass along money-making tips (i.e., whose mansion full of goods will be vulnerable over the weekend). Does She feel guilty? “Truth was, who was getting hurt by my doings, except those who chose to buy cigarettes and booze without sales tax, gamble away their paychecks, skimp their wife by paying back-of-the-truck prices for an anniversary string of pearls?” Besides, She says, Denton “got me jobs, she got me fat stacks of cash too thick to wedge down my cleavage. She got me in with the hard boys, the fast money, and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted more.”

Until Vic Riordan comes along: a sleazy gambler whose right moves in bed more than make up for his wrong moves at the track. She knows Denton wouldn’t approve. She knows this is the wrong guy at the wrong time. And Riordan knows exactly what She does for a living. Specifically, he knows about Her business visits to the track on her boss’s dime, which could settle his latest debt and keep him alive. She finds herself torn between the woman who gave her everything (with a legendary violent streak) and the man who could cost her all of it (but who she can’t resist). Will she bet on love? Remain loyal? Lookout for herself? Will Denton turn out to he be Her mentor/mother-figure, or a cold-hearted murderess? More importantly, how long after you’ve finished the book does it take for you to stop sounding like a fast-talking, shady dame?

Pretty soon there’s stolen money, a dead body, a missing furrier, a couple of naïve cops not yet on Denton’s payroll, and a letter opener just waiting to spill everyone’s dirty secrets. There are more than enough twists and turns in the story to keep you turning the pages.

Abbott, once a noir scholar, consistently mixes up the formula with each of her novels. She takes the greatest leap with Queenpin by reversing the gender roles and giving us a female narrator/protagonist. With Chandler, Hammett, and Cain, male leads were smitten with, betrayed by, or nearly ruined by gals with the goods. Here, She is the one sidetracked, maybe even duped by a man. She and Denton are not your typical noir vixens – voiceless, dishonest, and cunning. Nor do they use sex to get what they want. All they want is to get through life on their own two feet, not their backs. Nevertheless, as with any noir worth a bullet, love and lust are just plain bad for business, no matter what sex you are. The whole setup goes bad, and Abbott does it so good.

by George Lakoff
104pp
Picador, 2007
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In this book, Lakoff argues that there are two dominant metaphors or frames that govern what we think about freedom and how it works – the strict father frame, in which a moral authority (often but not always a father figure) establishes a set of values that command absolute (or near absolute) obedience; and the nurturant parent frame, in which a mother or a father (or both) create an environment that encourages self exploration and a respect for the needs of others. These frames are first put into place by an individual’s family, Lakoff argues, but they may also be challenged or augmented by a variety of experiences and environments, including the school classroom, the church, and the Little League game.

But this is first and foremost a book about politics, and in this vein Whose Freedom? attempts to make sense of the fractious and sometimes apparently inconsistent views of the “left” and the “right” of American politics, or as he labels them, the “progressives” and the “radical conservatives.”

“Freedom” here is the “first idea” of American democracy, and Lakoff asserts that radical conservatives have contorted the word “freedom” to fit their strict-father frame, thereby challenging and rolling back the “progressive” freedoms that had been, in Lakoff’s view, the traditional sense of freedom that had been inculcated by the Founding Fathers. He argues that it is the “progressive” view of freedom – the nurturant parent view – that resulted in the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor reforms, the modern expansions of civil rights, and the environmental movement.

According to Lakoff, the strict-father metaphor establishes a moral hierarchy with a single leader, where everyone in the hierarchy knows who they are and consequently what their role is. Morality then is a matter of obedience to a higher authority. In this metaphor, obedience is rewarded by god or the free market, or both, and disobedience is punished by hell or poverty, or (preferably) both. The mechanism for working out one’s success or a failure is unbridled capitalism, where competition, which is “natural,” hones self-discipline and selects a “winner.” Lakoff’s great insight here is to show how this single metaphor explains the radical conservative position on a wide range of seemingly diverse issues – from the war in Iraq, to abortion, taxation, social programs, and others – and how all are fundamentally linked to a certain idea of freedom.

Lakoff then demonstrates how the nurturant-parent metaphor takes the contrarian’s position on the aforementioned issues. As opposed to the hierarchical model that establishes authority outside of the self, the nurturant-parent metaphor is cooperative and centered on empathy and personal and social responsibility. Individuals must discover who they are for themselves, and morality is a matter of “doing unto others,” which recognizes that the freedom of the one depends upon the freedom of the many. The free market is a tool meant to lift all boats, not just the boats of executives and entrepreneurs, and the Christ of the Gospels provides a model of right behavior, not an excuse for bigotry.

Lakoff provides a multitude of examples drawn from contemporary debates as varied as welfare reform and school prayer, and the book is meant for the layperson rather than the academic. Whose Freedom? is a field manual instructing progressives on how to “re-frame” issue debates so as to bypass and hence nullify the radical-conservative frame, and taken as such it is instructive, even if one is not of a leftist bent. An essential question that dogged me throughout the book, however, was, “What makes one metaphor better than another?” If Lakoff is correct and our reasoning is contingent upon our frames, then how does one evaluate which frame is better? According to whose criteria? If I tell a born-again Christian that his truth is “wrong” and “dangerous” to freedom and free inquiry, I am not only not going to win the argument, I’m guilty of the same fallacy to which I’m opposed. Is progressivism “better” because it reduces harm, or enhances happiness, or enlarges free will?

Moreover, if frames become a part of our brain structure, if empathy, for instance, is encoded into our neural pathways from childhood, then how is it possible to change the brain structures, the essential framing metaphors, of millions of radical conservative adults who are themselves encoding the strict-father frame onto their children? Lakoff’s tactic – reframing the policy debate – might work for an election or two, but does Lakoff’s method address the more fundamental, long-term issue?

These questions are compounded by the author’s handling of Christianity, which he asserts has been distorted by fundamentalist Christians to fit the strict-father, moral law frame. Traditional Christianity is progressive in nature, and models itself after the example of Christ – taking care of the poor and powerless, championing the oppressed, loving one another. However, Lakoff’s argument doesn’t take into account the elephant in the room – the matter of faith – that automatically removes agency from the individual and places it onto a distant Other. The Quakers specifically locate Christ within the self, but the Quakers represent a very slim minority of the millions of Christians in the U.S. who, with the recitation of every Nicene Creed, willingly locate the seat of moral authority outside of themselves.

But these are less criticisms of Lakoff’s work than ideas for further exploration. The essential arguments of Whose Freedom? are thought provoking and insightful, particularly his clever dissection of President Bush’s second State of the Union speech. What is most helpful is the placement of radical conservatism within a context which, if not entirely reasonable, is at least understandable.

Michael Broek is an Assistant Professor of English at Brookdale Community College. He is also a doctoral student in American Literature at the University of Essex (U.K.), where he is completing his thesis, “Were It a New-Made World: Hawthorne, Melville and the Unmasking of America.” He holds an MFA in poetry from Goddard College and his poems have been published in The Cimarron Review, The Portland Review, Verse Libre, The Sycamore Review, Sundog, Del Sol Review, Fourteen Hills, Stirring, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in 49th Parallel and is forthcoming in The International Review of the Humanities. He is also the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the NJ Council on the Arts.

by Ma Jian
104pp
Picador, 2007
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If you are like most Westerners, you picture Shangri-la—and by extension all of the vast, unreachable places of Tibet—as a hidden spiritual oasis, a paradise of purity, calm, and godliness presided over by benevolent monks in keeping with ancient traditions. In Ma Jian’s 1985 short story collection Stick Out Your Tongue, Tibet emerges instead as place of isolation, desperation, and ignorance. Twelve years later, the stories in this reprinted volume are still not only riveting but relevant, even as Chinese control over Tibet has mostly changed from militarism to vacation colonialism.

In Stick Out Your Tongue, a young Han Chinese journalist and photographer, perhaps Ma’s alter ego, escapes his failed marriage and the miseries of Communist-controlled Beijing and journeys to Tibet. He witnesses a traditional sky burial (“The Woman and the Blue Sky”), in which a young woman’s tragic life ends when her corpse is hacked into pieces and fed to vultures and photo-documents her remains. He listens with apparent dispassion to the story of a female Living Buddha who dies at fifteen-years-old, abandoned in a frozen river as part of a yogic initiation rite after undergoing a brutal Tantric ceremony akin to rape (“The Final Initiation”). He coolly receives the story of an elderly man who is seeking penance for having sex with his daughter, herself the product of a union between the man and his own mother (“The Eight-Fanged Roach”).

Ma’s gift is for precise, realistic detail and a calm, even pace that mounts to increasingly hallucinatory and horrifying conclusions. Like a surrealist painting, the story’s smooth, detailed surface leads to a profound dislocation. In “The Woman and the Blue Sky,” he observes, "with her belly squashed to the ground, sticky fluid began to trickle from between her thighs." Stooping to help the woman’s two husbands dismember her corpse, still with an unborn baby side, he says, “I picked up the axe, grabbed a severed hand, ran the blade down the palm and threw a thumb to the vultures.”

The writer’s hyper-realism means to suggest that we are getting the whole story, but in various places a sense of mystery blossoms beneath the journalist’s thorough reporting of rape, incest, theft, and poverty. He sees the papery remains of a woman’s corpse, dry and thin and stretched, on a cabin wall, and while he listens to the story of the woman’s death, he comments, “What is still a mystery to me, though, is that although the man’s story was about a love affair he’d had as a young man, he claimed that the events took place four hundred years ago.”

Most touchingly, when interviewing the lover of the woman from the sky burial, he asks the distraught Han Chinese soldier, “‘Why didn’t she visit you again?’”

“‘She did,’ the soldier replied, ‘I just don’t want to tell you everything.’”

Many of the stories deal with incest, a fitting topic in a place known for being closed, isolated, and culturally inbred, feeding off itself, cut off from the march of progress, whether it be socialist or capitalist. Despite Tibet’s airy, top of the world perch, the stories feel claustrophobic, a tangle of polluted familial relationships strained past endurance by poverty and oppression. The Hans are yoked together with the Tibetans, and both suffer for it.

The narrator wrestles with his sense of being an outsider, and the stories he hears affect him more than is at first apparent. In some cases, he directly intervenes in the lives of others (for example, hiding the whereabouts of the abandoned daughter in “The Eight-Fanged Roach”). The narrator’s evasiveness, his inability to do more than stand and report, or blundering intervene, mimic Tibet’s strained relationship with the uncaring Chinese government and well-meaning but misguided foreigners.

For his own part, Ma never allows his work to stray too far into fantasy. Fantasy, after all, has been the rest of the world’s preferred way of dealing with Tibet for centuries. Nonetheless, he speaks in his afterword of a land where myth and reality live close together, breathing the same cold, thin air. Spirituality and superstition are parts of life, sometimes uplifting but often cruel and indifferent to human suffering.

The Tibet Ma reveals has been forever warped by Chinese “liberation.” Monasteries have been co-opted and destroyed, and the culture deformed by suffering. But Ma stops short of idolizing the theocracy that preceded Chinese rule. “For Tibetans,” his narrator says simplistically, “death isn’t a sad occasion, merely a different part of life.” The death that fills his pages makes a mockery of this simple formulation.

"Westerners idealise Tibetans as gentle, godly people,” Ma Jian explains in the afterword, “but in my experience Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny their humanity."

When Ma Jian first published these stories in China in the 1980s, the book was banned for being “a vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots,” and a future ban was placed on all his works. Ma Jian went into exile in Hong Kong and then in London; his editor was fired; his friends and fellow writers were interrogated and in some cases, jailed. Some have argued that Ma’s works are less relevant now, that they do not take into account China’s dramatic economic growth and dramatically changed cultural landscape. But Ma Jian’s description of Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, as "a dirty, polluted city like any other you might find in China, with karaoke bars and massage parlours and gaudy neon signs” will ring true enough to the ever-increasing number of visitors.

by Emily Mitchell
390pp
W. W. Norton & Company, 2007
$24.95 Boston Globe Review Buy the Book

For those unfamiliar with the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, he is best known for “The Family of Man” exhibition made up of some 500 photos that captured love, life, and death in 68 countries. He founded the photo-secessionist movement with Alfred Stieglitz and later became the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. A close friend of Auguste Rodin, he also ran in the social circles of Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse. While he found great success in his art, he was thought to be an absent father and husband.

Mitchell concentrates much of her story during the tail end of World War I in 1918, when Steichen, commander of the American Expeditionary Force photographic division, arrived in France to take aerial photographs of the war. He is in unfamiliar territory in more ways than one. Unlike his previous work, these photographs “were not made to be beautiful, but to be clear.” His photographs of enemy terrain were strictly utilitarian, which is just as well, because he can no longer bear to capture the beauty in the world.

The chaos of war seemed the perfect escape for Steichen from the irreparable discord of his personal life at home. His wife, Clara, has left him, taken their daughter away, and sued him for “alienation of affection,” because she thinks he’s having an affair with her best friend Marion Beckett. But eventually he realizes even the war cannot hide him from his troubles when he awakens to see Marion, his alleged mistress, working as a nurse and caring for his wounds.

But amidst the devastating accounts of death, pain, and suffering, Mitchell still manages to interject the random moments of unexpected beauty that inhabits the bleakest places. A shell striking the storeroom of a hospital is described as having caused the nearby trees to fill with what looked like festive white streamers but were really just bandages.

Mitchell bounces back-and-forth from the present war to the summer of 1914 and earlier. She introduces the flashbacks with titles of Steichen’s photographs, which are then brought to life with Mitchell’s elegant narrative. Although the scenes of the past build up to the unraveling of his marriage, they are overall images of happier times detailing Edward’s courtship with Clara, his blossoming artistic promise, and his supportive circle of friends: “he could hardly believe that he used to have a life consisting of such wonderful, ordinary things.” The frozen past is everything that the present is not: blissful, beautiful, and idyllic. It serves as a stark contrast to what confronts him now: a bloody world war, a marriage in shambles, and a family broken apart.

While Steichen wants to hold on to these photos and all they represent, Clara wants to finally be free of them and their unfulfilled promise of a loving husband. She has put up with his affairs, mothered his children, and sacrificed her own musical talents for him, and “he does not even seem to notice.” The final insult of having her husband love her best friend proves too much for her to bear. She wants desperately to “walk into a new life without the weight of the past, clean.” To Clara, the photographs are records of Steichen’s perspective of the past that accepts adultery as “a natural right as a man,” disregards her feelings, and holds her back from living her own life. She, like Steichen, is only able to face the present and beyond after the delicate past, “susceptible to sun and to damp,” has been finally relinquished.

In Mitchell’s poignant search for the man behind the photographs, she gracefully uncovers a complicated life haunted by love and regret.

by Anthony Doerr
224pp
Scribner, 2007
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Don’t let the book’s subtitle—On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the World—fool you. Four Seasons in Romeis not about twins or insomnia or the pope’s funeral; in fact, it is about nothing in particular. This is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Doerr does not attempt to shape his experiences living in Rome into a tidy plot infused with an overriding conflict, which might have been easy enough given what he had to deal with: raising twin boys, writing a third book, acculturating from town to city and America to Italy, and witnessing the pope’s death. For readers who want an overarching narrative, Four Seasons in Romewill disappoint. Yet Doerr’s resistance to create a convenient plot out of his own life is what makes this book so good. Doerr has written what a memoir should be: a confusing amalgam of stuff that doesn’t add up to much, because life, unlike fiction, can’t be crafted.

That isn’t to say that the telling of the life cannot be crafted, and it is in the telling that Doerr excels. Doerr is a master observer, able to analyze sensory experience into the tiniest slivers, thereby transforming the very thing he is describing. It comes as no surprise that Doerr’s book refers to Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary critic who believes that art should eliminate the automatic nature of perception, so that people might “recover the sensation of life.” Four Seasons in Romeis testament to Shkolvsky’s aesthetic philosophy. Take, for example, Doerr buying Parmigiano: “The gray-haired proprietor, wearing his white coat, a scientist of cheese, hacks our wedge off a wheel the size of a spare tire.” Or, a scene in which a man and his dog—“a massive dog, a Newfoundland, maybe a hundred pounds”—board a motorino: “The dog circles the scooter, sniffing. The man lights a cigarette and puts on a helmet and finally seats himself and nods to the dog—hardly a motion with his chin—and the dog scrambles onto the tiny platform in front of the man’s feet. Strings of drool swing from his jaw.”

To be sure, Rome has a lot to offer in terms of description, but the city’s charms have little to do with the beauty of Doerr’s prose. Doerr tackles even the dull and the ugly. Of his children’s teething, he writes, “I try to imagine sprouting big, round pieces of skeleton through my gums.” And dressing wet babies “is like trying to put pajamas on a mackerel.” However, Doerr’s longer passages about parenting sometimes fail, descending at times into preciousness. Regarding his feelings toward his own children, Doerr lapses into the indescribability syndrome: “It’s unqualifiable and almost certainly inexhaustible.” These moments, however, are rare. For the most part, Doerr takes advantage of his children’s presence: their perspective serves to refract habitualization.

Four Seasons in Romeavoids the facile notations regarding culture and language so common in other travel memoirs. Doerr is careful to choose only the most evocative moments wherein language yields confusion. When his wife loses consciousness and is hospitalized, Doerr cannot find the appropriate words to explain her physical symptoms. He states, “The word I know for ‘faint’ is indistinto.” This example unveils both a revelation about the nature of language and a serendipitous metaphor, because there is something strangely unsettling about fainting that renders the world indistinct, both for Doerr and his wife. Early in the book, Doerr admits that his culture shock will be twofold. Not only is he a country guy in a large city, but also he is an American in Europe. After this, he refuses to indulge in easy cross-cultural comparisons. Every detail that Doerr includes is beautiful in its complexity: “A town car slows beside us, a gloved hand on the wheel, red lace in the backseat, a Siamese cat on the rear window ledge.” Contrast this with a travel memoir I read a year ago that mentioned that women in France do not wear sneakers. Thank you, Mr. Doerr.

Four Seasons in Romeis written in present tense, a choice that limited the narration. It sometimes made the story feel a bit too fragmentary and it fought with the book’s seasonal organization, which obviously implies chronology. In the end, I decided that the positive effects of using present tense outweighed the negative. By giving the memoir immediacy, the present tense helped Doerr involve readers with his observations, so that the book became less about how Doerr observed Italy and more about how readers did. Ultimately, Doerr has written a memoir that is not self-indulgent. In fact, Four Seasons in Romeis humble, almost selfless. Here is a memoir that is decidedly not about its author: it is about the nature of perception and interpretation. And luckily, readers get to examine consciousness in the great city of Rome, amidst “terra-cotta roofs,” “the scattered green of terraced gardens,” and “astounding trees, trees both unruly and composed at once, like princes who sleep stock-still but dream swarming dreams.”

by Pamela Erens
143pp
Ironweed Press, 2007
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The Understory’s minimal plot involves Jack’s attempt to keep his New York City apartment after his landlord initiates eviction proceedings. Eager to kick out his remaining tenants and renovate his property, the landlord sends an architect, Patrick Allegra, to photograph Jack’s building. For much of the novel, Jack narrates his growing obsession with Patrick in retrospect, from the relative comfort of the Zen center where he currently resides. Erens has the elements of a much more action-packed plot. Jack, for instance, could be less shy in his pursuit of Patrick. Or maybe Jack, a former lawyer, can get back into legal practice and eventually advocate for wronged tenants across the city such as himself. Many a first-time novelist would have been seduced by the conventional wisdom that events alone can keep the pages turning.

Erens’ narrative, however, is not your typical debut. The soul of this novel is its meditative lyricism, rendered in language that is as exquisite as it is penetrating. Erens’ suggestive title is a botanical term for the low-lying plants that Jack studies on his frequent trips to Central Park. It is the dwindling understory—of “witch hazel and jetbead, blackhaw and sweet pepperbush” that Jack believes is missing:

The park became like the city: skyscrapers, no texture. And that meant it was dying. The things that live at ground level are what hold the earth fast, buffering the grander plants from flooding, salt, and erosion. Central Park was built on rocky, inhospitable land, and its secret is the shallowness of its soil, its only tenuous ability to sustain life. It is the shrubs that allow the park to survive.

Jack’s fascination is the novel’s—the overlooked yet essential. Readers may grow frustrated with his propensity to brood, but they are rewarded when Erens explores the different facets of Jack’s inner life—and the life of the city where he lives.

If anything, Erens’ novel is less compelling when it tries to insinuate more plot. While the author avoids easy answers to Jack’s problems, there is the strong suggestion later in the novel that all he really needs is love. His fascination with Patrick provides comic relief from an otherwise stark life wandering the streets; Jack seems to act out fragments from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse when he agonizes over how to best approach Patrick. When Patrick leaves a brief note for Jack at the apartment, Jack subjects it to the kind of scrutiny that could only come from the romantically obsessed: “I’d hoped to find you in. I read this brief note, scrawled in hurried, uneven, rather childish handwriting, several times over, parsing the implications of Please forgive. Did those words, placed first, rob I’d hoped to find you in of any intimacy?” Yet Jack is ultimately more interesting as an eccentric seeker than as a lovelorn stalker.

On the whole, however, The Understory is successful at the most difficult of fictional forms—the novel of ideas distilled through the ordinary life of its protagonist. It is a worthy Northern counterpart to Percy’s metaphysical exploration of the everyday South, and a reminder that originality and depth can be found in a fiction’s language, not just in the breadth of the experience it represents.

by Liz Moore
320pp
Broadway Books, 2007
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An hour later, and the three of them are still awake. The girls are alert and smiley in their cribs, gurgling and cheering. Ready to play at three o’ clock in the morning. Tom’s eyes are closing, but each time he makes for the door Alice whimpers threateningly. A police car goes by and casts its blue and red stain across the wall. Tom wants to cry. Most of all, he wants to sleep. He has to leave tomorrow and he’s going to be wasted.

To simply list the characters would suggest that they are all ‘types’ taken from the stockroom of characters we suspect would inhabit a novel about the music industry. Yes, there is a business executive, an up-and-coming female singer, a cocksure talent scout, a music reporter, but, in Moore’s hands, they are so much more than their roles. Tom, the lead singer for a major rock band, is one of the central characters. Some of the narrative spins around the people who may be close to him, or who want to be close to him. He is a Rock Star, and his fans’ fantasies of him know no bounds. Unfortunately, Tom is going through a mild crisis of confidence, and his increased sensitivity is the consistent back-cue of his own private recording. In the section devoted to him, titled “Tom, Who Cannot Save the World,” he is a man who is deep into the Impostor Syndrome, whose self-talk is like a Greek chorus of warbling adolescents and worried dads: “The windows of the bus are tinted, Tom knows, but he still feels strange staring through them at this horde of young people...Tom has the conviction that… they probably would have made fun of him in high school…He watches as three girls run toward the bus and Tom is afraid…that they will be caught beneath its wheels, crushed like animals.”

From here, the author moves us into the narrative perspective of these three girls. One of whom idolizes Tom, but will feel hypnotized into giving up her virginity for a one-night stand with someone else from the band—just because they’re connected. These characters are not drafted from central casting. They are singular, specific, wholly believable.

All of the characters who spin in and out of this narrative seem vitally important and interesting. The problem is that these characters are always threatening to spin out of control. Take Theo, for example. At 26, he is the contract guy for Titan, a big-time music publisher. We meet him on the way to listen to a band’s audition. If he likes the band, he’ll make an offer to them, then go back to his boss and advocate for them. Or, not. He is (and who wouldn’t be?) impressed and amazed by his own power, by his destined success in a business he got into accidentally. He enjoys the hush that falls over the room when he enters it, because he is “the one with the contracts sticking out of his messenger bag.” He is the lynchpin upon which hope and fear, disappointment and delirium hang. At least for the young boys and girls whose bands he can make or break during an audition:

Theo knows the kid, whose name is Kyle, is standing in front of him, but he takes a few beats before he looks up. Kyle says, ‘I just wanted to thank you because we’re, you know, we’re really grateful that Titan brought us out here to New York, and we want to say that we’re hard workers’... Immediately Kyle knows this wasn’t a good idea and he should have just played the fucking song. God, thinks Kyle, why am I so uncool?

‘Yeah,’ Theo says.

Each of the 14 chapters begin with the snappy quality of a song title (Sibohan in Love, Mike Has Never Seen), followed by an excerpt of lyrics from artists
such as Leonard Cohen, Puccini, Patti Smith. Each of the lyrics seems profound, as a line from a poem or a disconnected quote can seem sometimes.

Refreshingly, the use of these lyrics is not some signal of how cool the author is for mentioning them. Rather, the excerpt serves the reader’s understanding of the human conflict unfolding ahead. Don’t be fooled by the short chapters, or by how easy it is to read this book. There is a lot of wisdom within The Words of Every Song. These words come from a Grandmaster who knows what she’s writing about.

by Gary Lutz
56pp
Future Tense Books, 2007
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As in his earlier collections, the stories in Lutz’ latest book, Partial List of People to Bleach, are plotted in only the most tangential ways and are deceptive in their brevity. Each story greets the reader like a puzzle, composed from elements never obvious or expected. The fleeting, hazy moments of Lutz’ fiction are seldom long enough to create a false sense of clarity, because as one character says, “The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.” They are just the right length to be read quickly and reconsidered for hours and days afterward. Though the collection is only a slim (fifty-six pages), it’s a slow read because the mind gets so caught up making sense of, and savoring what has been read. Moving from one story on to the next is harder than with more conventional, familiar writing: there are no easy descriptions here.

Most of Lutz’ stories concern down-and-out, outcast, and often disturbing characters with awkward obsessions and kinks. The protagonist of the opening story, “Home, School, Office,” is a college professor who admits to, even revels in, being disliked by his students and largely incompetent in his profession. Partial List of People to Bleach teems with incestuous families, damaged children, and men and women as coldly distant from the world and each other such as the narrator in “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” who describes her former husband as “largely a passerby.” She goes on to say that

He had an unconsoling side, this husband, and a mean streak, and a pain that gadded about in his mouth, his jaw, and there was a bumble of blond hair all over him, and he couldn’t count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly.

He drove a mutt of a car and was the lone typewriter mechanic left in the territory, a servicer of devastated platens, a releaser of stuck keys.

I would let him go broadly and unwitnessed into his day.

So much of what makes Lutz’ stories distinctive, difficult and worthwhile is in the above passage—the characters viewing one other only from a distance, reflected in the language of “this husband” with no hint of possession or closeness; the descriptions of lives assembled from disjointed, apparently unrelated details, relying on the reader to put them together; and sentences built the same way, out of phrases like “get a done day butchered improvingly,” insisting on genuine effort to work out exactly what’s meant despite each word being familiar in isolation. The stories of this collection are studded with details that jar and jab the reader in the same way the aforementioned wife goes on to relate how she “thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet—whatever it took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.” This description could also apply to Lutz’s stories, which strip bare our preconceptions about fiction and how it functions, then hurt us as revolutionarily as the hidden teeth of a comb.

In “Six Stories,” a series of ambiguously connected vignettes, the narrator waits “for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.” Gary Lutz offers just such a language, uniting his characters and his readers in a challenge to make sense of the world through details ordinary enough on their own but brought together in unexpected, puzzling ways, and the world is made new in the process. Whereas other authors rely on fantasy to achieve this recreation, Lutz turns the supposedly banal and mundane into anything but, and reminds us of the constant negotiations of confusion and construction that life—and, at its best, literature—demands. It isn’t always, or often, pleasant, but it is as rich with possibility as an observation made by the child narrator of “Tic Douloureux”:

That day I began to develop an appreciation for how things upstairs sounded to people underneath. From every footfall, every stride, came a creak that rippled outward until it overspread the entire ceiling of the room. The effect was one of resounding activity, of achievements far and wide.

by Kate Christensen
305pp
Doubleday, 2007
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Along with sleeping with most of his models, Feldman also maintained two separate households—one with his wife, Abigail, who raised their autistic son Ethan in Manhattan, and the other with his mistress Teddy, who raised twin daughters in Brooklyn. Feldman’s cranky sister Maxine struggled to achieve a similar reputation for her abstract work, even as Feldman himself cemented his reputation as a stalwart and unrepentant figurative painter of the female nude. Thus Christensen establishes, with Abigail, Teddy, Teddy’s best friend Lila, and Maxine, an Oscar-related matrix prime for alliances, spats, and revelation. As is often the case, the characters’ versions of Feldman ultimately reveal far more about each character herself than they do about the topic of the biography.

Part of what makes these revelations so interesting is that all of Christensen's central characters are women in their 70s or 80s. Rather than old crones, grandmas, or wise women though, Christensen's sept- and octogenarians are vibrant, even erotic, figures still pulsing with desire and frustration. Christensen herself, in an interview about her novel says this:

I set out to allow my characters, women in their 70s and 80s, a kind of frank sexuality I haven’t seen in “older” women in literature. Teddy is English, given to innuendo and flirtatious ceremony more than blatant lust, but she says “fuck” and is excited by food and wine and the idea of sex, the language of sex—Abigail, the Conservative Jew, is somewhat repressed, but her three-year-long affair with Edward, Ethan’s poetry-reading, cognac-sipping young doctor, provided her with a lifetime’s worth of memories and erotic longing…Maxine, a nonreligious Jew and a frank lesbian, is lusty and bluntly so, unrepressed and straightforward…

Indeed, Christensen succeeds in creating a cast characters who are all still very engaged with the pleasures of living, be they sexual, intellectual, or culinary. In fact, much of the reader’s delight in this book too, is in how well Christensen captures these pleasures. Christensen’s prose is full of the elegant turn of phrase, clear, yet rich. The characters themselves, even when unpleasant with one another, engage in snappy and thoughtful dialogue. Reading their dialogue as they banter about art or relationships is a bit overhearing some imaginary intellectual dinner party. Even the bitter verbal sparring is somehow satisfying, both to the reader and, one suspects, to the character’s themselves, in its sophistication. Writing about sexual desire in older people, Christensen manages both to be a realist and yet generous, capturing the erotic charge and excitement still central to these women’s lives. And, of course, it would be hard not to mention Christensen’s descriptions of her character’s meals, which induce salivation without ever being over-wrought or obtrusive—even as Christensen cleverly acknowledges the danger of attempting to describe food in her early scene with Teddy and a biographer after she declares that no man should ever use the word “delicious”:

“This looks”—he cleared his throat—“delicious, but now I can’t say it.”
Their eyes met.
“A pernicious word,” she said with smug satisfaction.
“Only because you made it into one. It was a fine word before I got here.”
“I only pointed out what ought to be clear to everyone.”
“A habit of yours.”
“Henry,” she said, pouring the wine, “eat your supper.”

He augmented his plate with things from the bowls Teddy had already set out: toasted sliced almonds, homemade apricot chutney, fried banana-pepper rings, minced raw red onion, matchstick-size pieces of fresh jicama, wedges of lime.

The food, which looked bland and unprepossessing, was subtle and amazing. the couscous tasted nutty and buttery. The rich chicken stew was laced with hints of saffron, cinnamon, cayenne, lemon zest, and something else…

Thus Christensen simultaneously captures the pleasure of barbed verbal flirtation while lingering over the more bodily pleasure of food. Much like the legend of the great Oscar Feldman himself, the novel overall is frankly sensual—delicious, actually, to read.

In a final clever flourish, Christensen frames her novel with two dead-on imitation New York Times pieces: the first, an obituary for Feldman, and the latter, a book review for the two Oscar Feldman biographies that we will never read. The final sentence reads, “Abigail Feldman, the late Maxine Feldman, and Teddy St. Cloud emerge in both biographies as fascinating subjects in their own right, so fascinating that this female reviewer couldn’t help wishing Mr. Feldman had moved over and given his real-life women a little more room”—which, of course, is exactly what Christensen has given us in The Great Man. This novel is a response to every great man (behind whom is a great ego, as Christensen quips) who has ever overshadowed the creative women around him—and what satisfaction it is.

by Peter Richmond
576pp
Picador, 2007
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Born Norma Deloris Egstrom in a small North Dakota town in 1920, Peggy Lee had a rough start in life. Her stepmother was a tyrant who beat and abused Peggy daily; her father was an undependable alcoholic who could neither defend Peggy nor support his family. Peggy grew up during the Depression listening to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on the radio, and dreaming of a way to leverage her substantial music gifts into a way out.

The first half of Fever reads like a conventional rags-to-riches story, as Peggy surmounts obstacle after obstacle to achieve ever greater fame, from her start at a town hall recital to her big break in 1941 as the female vocalist in Benny Goodman’s band. It was with Goodman that she recorded three of her best-loved songs, “Let’s Do It,” “I Got It Bad,” and "Why Don’t You Do Right?"

For all but the most dedicated fans, this early section may drag, though the biography’s repeated formula (trepidation-audition-success) is enlivened by some excellent characters, including the formidable Goodman himself, as well as songwriter Johnny Mercer and British writer and playboy Patrick Skene Catling. The descriptions of life on the road with Goodman’s band are the highlight of the book, and may occasionally make you wish you were reading a biography of Benny instead.

Lee’s subsequent solo career was marked by hits like “Lover,” “Fever,” "Is That All There Is?" each performed best in small venues framed by a carefully choreographed stage routine. Lee’s signature style was intimate, confessional, and erotic, marked by a seductive blend of irony, humor, world-weariness, glamour, and grace. She combined elements of Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Anita O’Day, but her voice and presence were uniquely her own.

Richmond can’t help but stray into some sordidness as he discusses his subject’s four failed marriages, her numerous romantic affairs, financial difficulties, lawsuits, and occasional lapses in taste (her daughter Nicki’s room in their palatial Beverly Hills home “had a white marble floor, mostly covered with white fur. Her bed was gold-leafed wrought iron surrounded by clouds of yellow chiffon. The canopy was caught back with gold-leaf antique carved wooden cherubs.”

But to his credit, Richmond’s narrative never wanders too far from Peggy’s astounding musical gifts. “She had the best sense of time, in the jazzman’s sense, of any singer,” André Previn said. Added to that was her extraordinary range, from breathy spoken word to full-throated roar, and everything in between. But perhaps most importantly, Lee had a gift for ringing every ounce of emotion out of even the lightest pop tunes, acting for the audience as much as singing.

Fever is at its best when it places Peggy in the context of her time, “the greatest generation of American music, singing at the height of an era when the American Songbook was the expression of the national heart and soul.” Richmond is nostalgic for this time when America boasted something like a single, unified public culture, and it was a fine one. “It was not a time, as now,” he explains, “when ‘popular’ and ‘disposable’ were interchangeable terms. It was a never-to-be-revisited era when popular novels were also literary and enduring, when popular movies where crafted and inspired and lasting. When music had meaning and resonance.”

Peggy Lee’s fame as a multi-dimensional jazz, blues, and pop singer (not to mention actress and songwriter) is the perfect example of an era “when art still shaped our popular media, from writing to film to music.” Nurtured by both Benny Goodman and Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee exemplified an integrated style that crossed not only genre lines but racial ones: many attested that on hearing Peggy’s voice on the radio, they didn’t know whether she was black or white.

In some ways, what killed Peggy’s career was the eventual splintering of that popular culture, along with the rise of rock and roll. Jazz became increasingly experimental and inaccessible, popular music increasingly confectionary and forgettable. What had once been the root of her appeal—her enormous range of styles and influences—made her impossible to categorize. Her pop fans were bored by her jazz albums, and her jazz fans mocked chart-topping hits like “It’s a Good Day” and “Mañana.”

But not all of Peggy’s critical jeers can be attributed to the changing musical scene. She also made a number of terrible career moves from bombing at a 1970 state dinner for Presidents Richard Nixon and Georges Pompidou to launching an unintentionally high-camp one-woman show entitled “Peg.” Ever the devoted fan, Richmond tries to tenderly smooth over these missteps, but his excuses aren’t always convincing.

Richmond’s biography is a nice break from the usual scandal-mongering celebrity bios, but his gentleness at times seems excessive. By all accounts—including her own—Lee was an extremely difficult person to work with, demanding, needy, and emotional. She drank excessively (though Richmond pointedly refuses to label her an alcoholic), ran threw a series of disastrous romantic affairs, and fell prey to a range of melodramatic, semi-imagined illnesses.

Richmond’s gushing praise can also lead to significant stylistic gaffes, as when he rhapsodizes, "So utterly given over to the song was she that to disturb the spell would have been to risk a fissure in the universe.” Moreover, his dominant theme (the battle between the artist’s two personas, the shy and insecure Norma Egstrom and the splendid but artificial Miss Peggy Lee) is a celebrity biography cliché, though no less true for being so.

Richmond may not be a prose stylist, but where he succeeds is in presenting a creative, versatile, universally pleasing, and criminally overlooked superstar to an American public of increasingly splintered affiliations and allegiances. Richmond should be congratulated by blasting Miss Lee back up on Rushmore, where she belongs.

by Stanley Plumly
96pp
W.W. Norton, 2007
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Birds abound in the pages of Old Heart. Even when a poem is not specifically about birds, a bird will creep in through some comparison. And when birds grow wearisome, he expands to include butterflies for good measure. Plumly is knowingly engaged in considering the bird both as a symbol freighted with great spiritual weight, appropriate to any book preoccupied with mortality, and as a straightforward element of the natural world. The butterfly and bird show up together in the poem “Nostalgia,” in which Plumly quotes Pound:

“The natural
object is always the adequate symbol,” though
Pound doesn’t say if the symbol by itself is
adequate. The imagination makes from not up.
Which, in his recent essay on the subject,
“Reading Poetry,” the critic Robert Scholes
seems sort of to agree with, that discovery
not invention is what brings the text to life…(l. 8-15)
…Yet he would certainly
have seen the bird grounded on one wing
before the butterfly; truth, then beauty. (l. 37-39)

Lest it seem, however, that Plumly might collapse his natural symbols beneath the weight of literary criticism, it’s worth noting that his most vivid and eye-popping poems handle birds on a more literal level, as in this one called “Birding:”

Some had the throats of sunsets,
some a pond’s gray-blue, some had thumbnail necklaces,
some the white of paper or ink from the glass inkwell.
Then you had to cut them if only in order to count them,
there at the sunset, the still pond or the necklace,
the whistle of a voice whose windpipe was a reed. (l. 1-6)

In other poems, Plumly writes with similar beauty and nostalgia about magpies, blue jays, cardinals, herons, pigeons, wrens, and, for the reader for whom things need to be made explicit, “spirit birds.” Much like Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Plumly seems to find his great soul symbol in the bird, but birds in all their varieties are a bittersweet reminder of the changing seasons of the natural world he fears leaving.

Plumly writes with a knowing, often-wry quality throughout this book. In his poem, “Simile” he finds a heart-shaped stone on the shore, and then proceeds to play with the comparative associations for a number seaside finds (including, of course, birds.) The self-consciousness can verge on being too much at times. At other times, however, it works, as in a poem Plumly’s archly titled, “‘The Morning America Changed’.” What follows is a poem in which the author and his wife go for afternoon coffee and biscotti in Italy on September 11, 2001. The quotidian afternoon coffee somehow captures the magnitude of what has happened back in the U.S. far more powerfully, albeit indirectly. Indeed, Plumly proves himself most trenchant in the indirect approach, as with “Greensboro Campus Sonnet.” This poem merely describes a college campus in springtime and a young couple kissing—and yet unlike some of Plumly’s more stately meditations on mortality, this poem has an elegant truth to it and doesn’t threaten to sink under its own weight.

Old Heart is a measured, technically accomplished book of poems. Rarely does the poems surprise or offer the flashy, delectable turn, but these poems do seem to open up with repeated readings. Old Heart is meant for the slow burn, the prolonged savor, not the one-time glance. And sure, every now and then, the reader may find him or herself wondering if all these birds and hearts aren’t a bit too much—but then again, if it means lines like this stunner, “the dark cardinal weight of his light heart doubled,” then maybe it’s proof that Plumly’s poetic instincts are on point.