by Erin Blakeslee, Nonfiction Editor

With the dwindling amount of newspaper and magazine pages dedicated to reviewing the arts in general and to literary writing in particular, I find myself especially galled by the appearance of long, overwrought negative reviews. 

Negative reviews are useful, especially to those who share the tastes of the reviewer.  They have the potential to save busy, underpaid consumers of the arts time and money spent on unworthy dreck.  And reviewers do, I believe, have a responsibility to the truth: no use trying to redeem work that is nothing more than lazy, gratuitously offensive, and cliché.

However, while some reviews must be negative, must they also be long?  Why drag on page after page of precious space - space which could, for example, be dedicated to introducing the world to an underappreciated gem of a piece - with tearing something apart?  This seems itself gratuitous to me, and recently, The Atlantic (though I appreciate the publication's history and many of its current writers) seems to be among the most flagrant practitioners of the multi-page screed.

B. R. Myers, in The Atlantic's December 2007 issue, took on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke ("It's the most critically acclaimed novel of the fall.  And it's astonishingly bad.") for what amounted to three whole magazine pages (and which, with an illustration and advertising, used up six).  Now, the most recent Atlantic (October 2008) finds Christopher Hitchens occupying a similar amount of room ripping apart Philip Roth's newest novel: "The narrator of Roth's Indignation may die off early and horribly--but it's the reader of this adolescent work who ought to feel the most outraged."  I myself have yet to read either of these and as such, will not defend them here.  Indeed, that is not even my point.  Couldn't Myers and Hitchens, were they so disappointed in these books, simply have written a brief paragraph about why they were not recommending them, and then gone on to tell us about what they believe we should be reading instead?

After all, life is short, and the time we have to read is shorter.  I consult newspaper and magazine reviews to direct me to the good stuff or to help me to appreciate a new angle of something I may have unfairly dismissed, not to have my attention long mired in a description of something that, by the reviewer's estimation, does not deserve it.

A Review of Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming

by Contributing Reviewer, Tony Russell

In July 2007, Ian Fleming Publications commissioned British novelist Sebastian Faulks to write an all-new James Bond novel. The new volume, Devil May Care, was released May 28, 2008 to commemorate the centennial celebration of Ian Fleming’s birth. (Fleming died in 1964 at the age of 56.) Faulks is the fifth writer after Fleming to write for the series and begins where Fleming left off in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Devil May Care is an enjoyable read, but for fans, it holds few surprises. The plot is the standard Bond formula (reconnaissance, girl, capture, victory) and feels like a cross between Dr. No and Casino Royale. It also reads like an index of previous Bond adventures, which will lose casual readers, but will challenge Bond connoisseurs to match up Faulks’s clues with Fleming’s novels and short stories. For example, Faulks mentions a name like Tracy di Vicenzo or that “whole Japanese night”, which avid fans will recognize as the name of Bond’s tragically-murdered wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a reference to his amnesia in Japan in You Only Live Twice, respectively. Bond’s own body in Devil May Care documents his perilous existence:

His torso and arms bore a network of scars, small and large, that traced a history of his violent life. There was the slight displacement of his spine to the left where he had fallen from a train in Hungary, the skin graft on the back of the left hand. Every square inch of trunk and limb seemed to contribute to the story.

The novel’s plot centers around shutting down an opium-processing plant in Iran. (Bond stops a smaller, but quite similar operation in the Fleming short story “Risico” in For Your Eyes Only). The principal villain, Dr. Julius Gorner, suffers from a rare physical deformity, main de singe, or Ape Hand, where the thumb of his left hand is not opposable. But what makes Gorner even more sinister, M explains to Bond, is that his “whole hand is completely that of an ape. With hair up to the wrist and beyond”. Gorner, sensitive about the deformity, hides the hand under a white glove.

Gorner’s deformity is a bit over the top, but no more than Dr. No’s dual prosthetic hooks. Still, there is a disturbing quality at how deformity and psychosis go together so often in the series. In all, Faulks’s verisimilitude overly depends upon Fleming’s previous body of work, despite the fact that the novel’s byline declares that Faulks is “writing as Ian Fleming.” Still, Devil May Care is a quick read that Bond fans will enjoy, even if Faulks’s allusions and Gorner’s long soliloquies sometimes slow down the action. Devil May Care is available in hardback from Doubleday for $24.95, but fans with indiscriminate loads of cash may take a look at the leather, hand-stitched, limited edition offered by Bentley for $1500, although the rest of us may have to hatch our own world-domination blackmail scheme to get our hands on one.

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

The adage warns us not to judge a book by its cover, though it is hard not to be attracted to Brock Clarke's most recent novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, what with its tongue-in-cheek title and burning orange background, the color of a Fire Lane warning sign.

But what of a first sentence?  Can we judge by that?  I find I often do, and it was Clarke's juicy, dramatic, hilarious first line that sold me when I first pulled his late 2007 novel off the bookstore shelf:

I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent ten years in prison and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a hgh price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter.

Thus begins Sam's tragicomic tale, which, true to the novel's title, sees the accidental arsonist's life events intersecting with the homes of Dickinson (whose house, in real life, still stands, lest fans read Clarke and fret), Twain, Frost, and others.

No scribe is safe in Sam's world.  He introduces us to a bitter literature professor who refers to Willa Cather as a c***, because, well, she "thinks all writers are c***s."  He recalls that his mother would never let him read Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird in the house "because they were so full of pity."  Sam even makes fun of his own author, Brock Clarke, when he comes across Clarke's earlier novel The Ordinary White Boy in a bookstore:

On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York.  I opened the novel, which began, "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York," and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn't all that different from the memoir shelf after all [...]

So apparently, Clarke allows his characters to judge by covers and first sentences, too!

Highly recommended, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is silly-yet-subversive beach reading for the type of well-read literary nerd that is more likely to spend her summer vacation touring writers' homes than actually going anywhere near a beach.       

I've been reading Alan Weisman's new book, The World Without Us, which is fascinating. The premise of the book is, what would happen if people just disappeared from the earth tomorrow? Drawing from civil engineering, anthropology, paleontology, ecology, and other natural sciences, he explains step by step what would happen to the world over time, beginning with crumbling houses to jungled cities. Within days, subway tunnels in major cities would flood and begin weakening structures from the bottom up. Meanwhile, expanding ice would crack up sidewalks, leaving room for trees and other plants to grow through the concrete, and fires would begin raging across rooftops as lightning rods corroded. Given enough time, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would settle, and an ice age in 15000 years would pulverize anything left--copper wires, bronze sculptures--to veins of dust under layers of soil. Weisman's voice is captivating and not very technical. My one qualm with the book is that it becomes a little to eco-friendly for my taste, going into too much detail about how polymers will never break down, and how every sea organism will soon have ingested tiny fragments of plastic. I guess that kind of argument comes with the territory of this book, but it's not as captivating as his descriptions of our world vanishing.

In the same spirit, I Am Legend, the new end-of-the-world zombie movie with Will Smith, is pretty decent. Based on an old Richard Matheson novel (and previously made into movies--The Omega Man, for instance), the story is that a team of scientists created an anti-cancer "virus" that either killed or turned into zombies all but 1% of the population. Smith's character and his German shepherd roam the empty streets of New York in an eerie and suspenseful first hour. But, because you need other characters for conflict, a woman and a child enter the story about halfway through, and from there the plot creaks a bit. The story feels rushed, events unearned, but Smith's acting is good and the imagery of empty Manhattan makes the movie a worthwhile vacation flick.

Liberating: the best word I can come up with for the experience I had reading Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection of poems, Green and Gray.  What else could I say about a poem that declares this victory over life's demands: "So much for problems and their solutions."?  What else could I say that would be more accurate than O'Brien's own commentary on the book and its methods, embedded throughout this self-aware collection?  As one poem puts it, "The feeling is / of the other side of the beginning of a bridge, / imaginary numbers, scratches on a table"; and these poems are "cold coals / of wildflowers, wars / at their centers, they go on for years / burning near the front / and from below."  Brilliantly conceived and executed, O'Brien has managed to be abstract and engaged in fairly lofty ideas without coming off as pretentious.

There is this warning for readers, though: if you're looking for perfect poems, you should probably look somewhere else; O'Brien doesn't write those.  He begins "The Nature of Encounters" by "already screwing up the end of the poem / with a hopeful form of forgetfulness."  If you're looking for poems that connect with you emotionally, that speak urgently to you, the reader, and bring comfort or mild epiphany to you in difficult times, this book might not be what you're looking for.  As O'Brien writes in “This Partly Imagined Tale,” "It may be / that feelings haven't been accurate / instruments for some time now."

What this book does take as its major concerns are the social, the intellectual, and the political; but especially, it addresses "the problem of senses confined to a head."  The focus on the perceiver, the senses, and the objects of perception keeps the poems from becoming didactic or sentimental by putting everything on the level of phenomenology.  His avoidance of a poetic voice as it is usually conceived of in the mainstream contemporary lyric also keeps him free of such pitfalls.  At the outset of "Objects in Portraits," he writes that, "In the uncertain light of the first person / anything made is embarrassing."  He has chosen an interesting way around such embarrassment; he has decided to compose many (possibly all) of these poems with the language of other texts: not his own expression, but the expressions of words moved and rearranged into new contexts.  In this way, the words do not follow an author's intended meaning so much as they precede it and give rise to it.  This reversal of the standard order of events or process is featured prominently in the poem “Hysteron Proteron” (the rhetorical term for such reversals).  It contains some of the most politically dangerous moments in the book.  O'Brien manages to cover bombs (think cruise missiles), toppled statues (think Lenin, think Saddam Hussein) and 9/11 with an intelligence and care to the nuances of connotation that allow him to get away with lines like “the fortuitous encounter on a sky / of two planes and two towers” and “911 Is a Joke, How Can I Move the Crowd, Police and Thieves, The Ocean.”  [Just for clarity's sake, “911 Is a Joke” is a song written by Public Enemy in 1990, here used as an example of how eerie hysteron proteron can be.]  Another poem, "They Met Only in the Evenings" (as a brief note at the front of the book explains), was composed using only language from the USA PATRIOT Act and Jean Genet's Querrelle.  "The New" was composed by extracting phrases that mark time from Dante's La Vita Nuova and arranging them into a meditation on causality.

The real achievement of this book is in the unexpected and often unexplainable moments of clarity that O'Brien arrives at through the expert use of these compositional methods.  "In Re Others" pulls this off better than any other poem.  One of many in the collection organized around anaphora—a technique which O'Brien employs to great effect—the poem moves along steadily on the repeated phrase, "There is this to say."  And much is said about the self and the “other”—those it coexists with—much of which “can be said with a ship / and a wave, with only and also."  But what it comes down to in the end is this: "a bee in a well, the edges of islands, / any meeting place of the one life and the other / and the rekillable flowers that grow there / as though to say: there is this."  The tail of the anaphora, "to say," has fallen off, and there is only "this" left, naked and glorious: a thingness that is beyond any of the poem's things, an awareness that is not confined to any sum or part of those who are aware, an imperceptible hum that can even resist the word silence.  I suppose this is what I mean when I call this book liberating.

-- Reviewed by Eric Scovel 

(University of California Press, 2007; $19.95)

I’ve started a project. Over the seven months, I’m reading books that fall under the heading of Global Historical Fiction…which is to say novels that deal with issues of politics, history, and nationality. I’m doing this partly because I love novels that deal with these themes, but also because it will provide good research for my own writing.

My aesthetic has always been for novels that, at heart, question nationality and the role of politics in our everyday lives. The pitfall, I think, is to write about these issues without becoming overtly didactic. Fiction, after all, (in the words of Philip Roth) is the exploration of private lives.

And perhaps that’s what Porochista Khakpour does best in her debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Press, 2007). Her characters are, above all, vividly imagined. Khakpour doesn’t rely on stereotypes and caricatures to paint them. You don’t see them drinking tea from samovars, sprawling on rugs, or exploring the metaphorical possibilities of saffron. They are not Iranian characters; they are characters that happen to be Iranian, which is not to say that race and nationality are not an important part of this novel. While the conflicts are familiar ones: father versus son, wife versus husband, cultural preservation versus assimilation, etc., Khakpour’s masterful handling of them is fresh.

The novel follows the trials of the Adam (pronounced Odd-damn) family who relocated to southern California (an apartment complex allegorically named Eden Gardens) from post-revolutionary Iran. The major conflict is between father (Darius) and Son (Xerxes), and seemingly stems from two incidents—one dramatized, the other recounted—with birds. In the novel’s humorous exposition, Darius is confronted by an angry neighbor who accuses him of belling the complex’s cats in order to save the blue jays. Years later, Xerxes recalls that incident while living in post 9/11 New York, asking for an explanation. Instead, Darius confesses a far darker secret about being a child in Iran and setting fire to doves. The confession divides father and son. As each man struggles to come to terms with his own depression and anger, the women in their lives carefully orchestrate their lives. Susanne, whom Xerxes meets after 9/11, eventually persuades him to face his fear and visit Iran, while Laleh persuades her husband to swallow his pride and communicate with his son.

While some might interpret the incidents with the birds as the crux of the problem between father and son, it would be more useful to pay close attention to Khakpour’s details: the Fruity Peebles and I Dream of Jeannie infatuation…the small New York apartment and desirability of hardwood floors. It’s through these details that Khakpour carefully portrays cultural and familial conflict and saves her characters from abstraction.

Khakpour’s style is certainly experimental. She writes fragmented sentences heavy with adverbs and liberally switches between points of view…reading her work is like going joyriding down a rocky mountainside. She splits words open and looks for their multiplicity of meanings. She translates words and customs from the Farsi with both eerie and hilarious effects. It’s thrilling and demanding work, but Khakpour makes it all worth it.

By Erin Blakeslee, Contributing Blogger

I may be a latecomer to the show (after all, the magazine in question has been in publication since 1974), but I read through my first sample copy of The Sun today. Cover to cover. I couldn't put it down.

For those who, like me just hours before, are uninitated, The Sun is an advertisement-free mag that publishes essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry that are politically challenging and philosophically provocative. It's clean, intimate layout is seductive: there's no fat on this baby, and no distracting margin ads listing MFA-program faculty, seminar dates, or book blurbs.

The October 2007 issue of The Sun features a moving, in-depth interview with poet and translator Coleman Barks, who discusses the enduring influence of Rumi, the 13th century Persian mystic poet. Part of the interview can be read here.

If you're hooked, you can order a free sample of The Sun (new reading material with nothing to lose!).

I've mentioned UBU web here before, in particular their /ubu_editions page. Over the past few weeks I've been reading some of the books published there. In their newest release (the third series, Spring 2007), one name in particular stood out: Mairéad Byrne. I had not heard of her until I went to AWP in February and saw her at two panel events. She also happens to be a graduate of the MFA program here at Purdue. I guess I did take something worthwhile from that conference after all.

SOS Poetry, is best described as a collection: it is clearly not a work that builds off of a single design plan, or has intentions of being analyzed as a whole work. It is divided into several sections, and even within each section there is little cohesion. But this is something of the point, I think, because the book draws all of its poems from Byrne's weblog Heaven from over the past five years or so: sort of a Best of Heaven; and weblogs are not designed for overarching consistency, which would aim for an effect of timelessness, but are organized around the timestamped post--which may build upon previous entries, but is more likely to follow the format of a journal or diary that demands the communication of a set progression of time.  There is something to be said too about a format that displaces the old in favor of the new.

I'm not much of a critic, really. I don't have any witty comments coming to mind right now. All I can say is that these poems read with an immediacy and a sense of joy that are difficult to ignore. They display a great sense of humor and wit, drawing on forms and subjects as diverse as advertisements, letters, announcements, advice, movie pitches, and ideas for works for art. It is obvious, too, that Byrne is very keen to the pleasure and/or trouble in words and our use of them (see "Bonkers," "Humidity," and my personal favorite, "Alright"). Variously, this is a fun and engaging collection, and a pretty quick read, too, if you're worried about how long it usually take to read a book of poetry.

Some of my favorites:

• Eaten Bagel
• Humidity
• Wind Chill
• Alright
• Peel-A-Way
• To Conquer Fear
• Another Self-Portrait
• Stop
• Letter Home
• When You Kiss The World

Just finished Robert Olmstead's new novel, and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys gritty war novels. It's the story of 14-year-old Robey Childs during the Civil War. After Stonewall Jackson is killed in May, 1863, Robey's mother has a vision and sends Robey to bring his father home from the war before July, when, the reader knows, the Battle of Gettysburg will occur. Robey's quest leads him through one episode after another of violence, and he gradually learns to reckon with the world as an adult. Olmstead writes at one point, "He also came to understand that he was finally finished with his believing in God." Olmstead is writing in the tradition of The Red Badge of Courage (for subject matter), Cormac McCarthy (for style), and Cold Mountain (again for subject matter), but the vision in the novel is his own. It's a very brutal, masculine world in Coal Black Horse, but flashes of tenderness, like heat lightning in the night, offer the reader something that resonates afterwards.

Carolyn Forché, who selected Dwaine Rieves’ book of poems for the 2005 Tupelo Press Award, writes “who is more qualified than a poet-physician to tell us, following Ovid's words, of how bodies change into different bodies?  Dwaine Rieves’ When The Eye Forms offers us that rarity, a poet-doctor’s book of days.”

I’m often drawn to books of poetry written by people who have “other lives” reflected in their work – the lawyer turned poet, the aeronautical engineer turned poet – and I’ve been impressed by the way Rieves’ poems render the daily actions and concerns of a working doctor.  When The Eye Forms gives us glimpses into the author’s experience in a Mississippi health department and a Gay Men’s VD Clinic where he volunteers in Washington D.C. 

The portraits Rieves’ paints are compassionate and gritty.  In “Leaving” he describes the parents who (by court order) take turns bringing their baby in for monthly check-ups, waiting on the curb afterwards, “stopping cars, thumbing a ride.” Forshé writes “the everyday here becomes magical – not because the poet is engaged in false pyrotechnics or inventions, but because he knows with an earned heart-knowledge that each human face can provide a map – leading us into the miracle of creation itself.”  Two of the poems in the collection, “Not the Same” and “Well Baby,” were previously published in Sycamore Review, and it’s a pleasure to see them again in the context of this book.

See Tupelo Press for details on ordering, or to read the judge’s complete comments.

--Laura Donnelly, Poetry Editor 

[crosspost]

If you're interested in Truth, Justice, and Goodness, and weary of postmodernism's apparent too-easy dismissal of all three, check out John M. Rist's Real Ethics, published in 2002 by Cambridge. Rist starts by recounting some passages from Plato's Republic in which Socrates presents Thrasymachus and Glaucon (and anybody else listening) with a fairly stark option: either there is nothing transcendent and your position is moral nihilism, or you are a "transcendental realist" and you believe certain acts are inherently good--you're a Platonist. Here's that part:

Plato thus sets up the problem of the objectivity of morality in the starkest possible terms. In the end, he holds, we have to decided between (an improved version of) the moral nihilism of Thrasymachus, for whom goodness is (objectively) whatever we are fool enough to believe if we believe it to be any other than made by man or some men, and the view of Socrates that moral terms, since and only since they have a fixed and transcendental point of reference, cannot be made to mean whatever we like, whatever is convenient, whatever seems to make sense at the moment or whatever we can get people to agree to. (20)

Rist makes clear why Plato will never go away, no matter how many times his work is "deconstructed" or dismissed by contemporary sophistry. However, Rist does what a contemporary critic must do: he suggests that the choice is a false one, that those are not the only two options, that there is a "way out" that is neither idealist nor nihilist. That's complicated, and that's a necessary philosophical gesture in a world conversant with postmodernism, but I prefer to think about that choice as a kind of ultimate decision that always has and always will face people. Socrates seemed to forsee the coming crisis of values that resulted from the sophists' clever language games, and I've always felt sympathy for his cause--

But... I'm going to read the rest of Rist's book, and if I find myself converted into a moral nihilist again, don't be too disappointed. Truth has nothing to do with convenience.

The Claremont Review of Books has published an interesting review of The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature in their Summer 2006 issue.  In the essay, Dorothea Israel Wolfson makes some pretty strong claims, among them that the anthology marks the end of the children's lit genre, and that the editors of the anthology

"aim in fact to dampen children's enchantment with the world, forcing them to acquiesce to the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults."

On the other hand, Wolfson openly admits that the book is meant to be read as a scholarly work, and is solely intended for college-level students.  This doesn't stop her from accusing the Norton editors of not believing, "it would seem, in childhood itself."  Because of the book's heavy focus on racism, sexism, and elitism in in such stories as Fun with Dick and Jane and King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, Wolfson even goes so far as to say that it is not so much an anthology as a "postmodernist manifesto."  Whew.  Decide for yourself by reading the essay here. 

Incoming fiction editor Tadd Adcox reviews Daniel H. Wilson's How to Survive a Robot Uprising, a book that is only becoming more relevant as humanity haplessly skis down the black diamond trail of total machine dependence.  Luckily, Humans United Against Robots (HUAR) is here to monitor the situation.

Robot Dog Shakespeare says (quoting Robot Dog Burns): The best laid schemes of mice and men are often crushed under the heel of the Glorious Perpetual Robot Army.

Check out our review of How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.

(Image courtesy HUAR and KATG.) 

Sycamore Review good buddy emeritus Gil Cook reviews Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.  Lynn Truss is also the author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which I once heard one of the most respected linguists in the country refer to as "that god-awful book."  Gil is decidedly more optimistic.

 Please enjoy.

I recently got a membership to Audible.com so that I could have something to listen to in the car while I commuted to a week-long summer gig I had - (If you don't know Audible, an online audio-store filled with radio shows from NPR and more books than you'll really ever have time to listen to, you should check it out, especially if you have a commute.  The audio quality of their books is excellent, you can sample the book and check out the reader's voice before buying, the download time is quick, and their prices are excellent, especially with a subscription.) - and downloaded Heat, New Yorker writer Bill Buford's new foodie book, now number twelve on the NYT best-seller list for hardcover non-fiction, in which he trails celebrity chef Mario Batali.

Although Audible's version was abridged (Tss!), the fact that Bill Buford himself was the reader almost completely made up for it.  Which is what I'd like to talk about.  (If you want reviews of Heat, here's one by Slate.com's Sara Dickerman, and here's another by NYT book reviwer Julia Reed.)  Buford was fiction editor at The New Yorker before he got distracted by food, and his attention to narrative, plot and character show not only in his prose (excellent!) but in his reading of it, as well.  Listening to Buford's book was a pleasure: his voice has depth without being gravelly, his intonation is interesting enough to keep listening to (we've all been to that ill-advised public reading) and he does voices.  I don't think I've ever enjoyed a commute more: the childlike pleasure I got in hearing Buford's imitation of Batali surprised me.  Even if you've read Heat already, take the hike here and listen to Audible's sample.