Herbert Hoover

By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 2009)

As the United States and rest of the world stare the possibility of global depression in the face, it has become common to compare the present day to the late 1920s and early 1930s. But Herbert Hoover, an intense new biography by New Deal historian William E. Leuchtenburg, draws parallels that can take your breath away.

In 1932, the country was facing a credit crisis the likes of which had never been seen. Americans were losing their jobs, their houses, and their life savings as the stock market crashed and banks collapsed. To stymie a plunge that could last years, Hoover OK’d the renewal of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize the financial sector, infusing $2 billion—a “staggering amount” at that time, Leuchtenburg reminds us—into banks, insurance firms, railroad companies, and other finance institutions. Will Rogers wrote that the bankers had “the honor of bring the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”

But efforts to save the banks and stimulate the economy from the top down backfired. Banks were still closing, though at a slower rate, and instead of loosening up credit markets, as the bailout was intended to do, banks found a way to use the millions to shore up their own holdings.

New York Senator Robert Wagner, a progressive critic of the Hoover administration, responded to this blank-check strategy by zeroing in on the fatal flaw of Hoover’s economic ideology: Even in extraordinary times, even in the face of starvation, Hoover believed welfare would impair the character of the needy and rob benefactors of the opportunity to exercise voluntarism and civic duty. Wagner, like many others, was stunned by Hoover’s decision to bail out banks. “We did not preach to them rugged individualism,” he said;

We did not sanctimoniously roll out sentences rich with synonyms of self-reliance. We were not carried away with apprehension over what would happen to their independence if we extended them a helping hand.… Must [the individual] alone carry the cross of individual responsibility?

I don’t think Leuchtenburg intended his biography to reflect so acutely our current hardships. His aim was to paint a not unsympathetic portrait of a hard man to have sympathy for. But as I zipped through this lucid book, I kept trying to think of a good word to describe the feeling of my frequently being taken aback. History repeats itself, sure, but how often does it do so with such vengeance?

* * *

No president had ever fallen from such a great height, Leuchtenburg writes. Hoover was a hero after World War I for feeding millions of Europeans as a food administrator. He organized the recovery of the American Midwest after a devastating flood along the Mississippi River. But his name came to be attached to the shantytowns—the Hoovervilles—where millions of poor and out of work ended up. Millions more lived in empty freight cars derisively called Pullman Hoovers. A couple who had named their son Herbert Hoover Jones eventually changed his name to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones in order to save him future “chagrin and mortification.”

When he lost a bid for a second term to FDR, Hoover lost badly. In 1928, he won forty (of 48) states. In 1932, he won six. “Not for eighty years had there been such avalanche of Democratic ballots,” Leuchtenburg writes; “1932 marked the worst defeat in the history of the GOP.” These superlatives suggest Hoover’s defeat was more than a referendum on his policies. It was a wholesale rebuke of ideologies that had given Republicans a popular majority since 1853 and that calcified under the reign of Big Bert.

These ideologies concerned the role of government.

Though authoritarian and eager to use executive power to bulldoze legislation, or bypass political debate entirely, Hoover was unwilling to expand government’s role in society. The president believed, Leuchtenburg says, “that one should rely not on government but on civic-minded individuals ‘imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice in full measure.’” Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana cited this position last week in his rebuttal to President Obama’s feux State of the Union address. Jindal said the best thing for post-Katrina New Orleans wasn’t government intervention. It was the spirit of community volunteerism.

Before his presidency, Hoover had even written a widely read book called, appropriately enough, American Individualism, in which he warned against the “tyranny” and “timorous mediocrities” of trade unions. But American Individualism, “a jejune screed” that was “little more than pamphlet,” Leuchtenburg says, showed another side of Hoover that was not ideological but pragmatic, a quality likely rooted in his time as food czar during World War I. Private underwriting of America’s effort to feed war refugees, he said, was of an “uncertain quality.” As philanthropy could only go so far, “we must obtain a regular government subsidy.” Pragmatism returned when he wrote that government regulation of capitalism was necessary because “we have learned that the foremost [i.e., the rich] are not always the best and the hindmost [the poor] are not always the worst.… Fair division [of capital] can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.”

This Herbert Hoover, however, didn’t show up for the Great Depression. In the end, ideology won out. At the time when something could have been done, Hoover left almost all responsibility to corporations who suggested consumers add sun porches to their houses to stimulate the economy. Then he gave banks millions. Later, as Americans were losing their savings and queueing up in bread lines, Hoover said they were suffering from “frozen confidence” more than “frozen securities.”

If that doesn’t remind you of Phil Gramm, John McCain’s former economics adviser who callously said we were in the middle of a “mental recession,” you haven’t been paying attention. But you’re not alone. Gramm led the 1999 charge against the Glass-Steagall Act, a law put in place during the Roosevelt administration that kept banks from investing on Wall Street. He also won legislation to deregulate derivatives, the financial instruments that brought down AIG and cost us $150 billion. Apparently, all of us keep forgetting our history. And our money, too.

John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.

A Heaven of Others

By Joshua Cohen (Starcherone Books, 2008)

A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen:

He hugged me I don’t know why I hug him back in return. Us, we hug tightly. We fall on each other. We feel for one and for others we fall. We feel. And we hug. Their eyes shut, they squeeze — just like lemons. And then they explode. Mind the seeds.

And so, with a bleating of radio goat voices naming the names of the dead and the oink-oink of pigs as heaven-bound traffic (drawn faithfully by painter Michael Hafftka), we are ushered up a shoe store ladder into the heaven of virgins and buffets as promised on the homiletic “Islamofascist” VHS tapes and cassettes you can buy on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn . . . No, not quite. A kind of dramatic escape into suspenseful anti-climax follows as, perhaps, in the Jewish tradition there is really no such thing as heaven and certainly no description, only a hopeful and equally vague notion of olam haba—a later, post-rabbinic introduction to Jewish theology that promised the Jewish Diaspora a messianic future in a perfected “world to come.” Jonathan, who has survived so much already, comes to this heaven to endure, to remember, to doubt, and to gossip; to expound his opinions on prayer, beet salad, tourism, and personhood; and to tell us who he was while he lived: who we are or were. His father is a piano tuner, his mother the Queen. He may or may not have had a brother named David who may or may not live with a “Movieperson,” a male lover in Hollywood, and this brother’s mother—Jonathan’s father’s first wife—may or may not have died of breast cancer; her tumor, in Cohen’s sincerely stupefying description, metastasizing into the K’aba or merely the black stone of secular helplessness, the speechless family all circling and circling around: “In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space . . .”

But if Cohen is not Philip Roth, he is also not Shalom Auslander or Etgar Keret, and this is not yet another voyeuristic novel in which heaven is an excuse for irony, empty parables, amusement parks, or some gratuitous tour of the fantastic in rollercoaster magical-realist prose. A Heaven of Others is closer to Bernard Malamud’s late book God’s Grace or the mythical tales of Amos Tutuola in its treatment of another reality: sincere, serious, tender, American, an allegory maybe, but never merely clever, never a superficial phantasmagoria, and never only a vehicle for something else. In fact, as soon as Jonathan gets to heaven he tries to find his way back. And so would you, if heaven consisted not of milk and honey but trees overripe with musical virgin fruit, camel caravans drawing illegible maps in the sand with their hooves, and a valley of nails in which a snake—instead of the Prophet—offers to be your guide. Having come to some unspeakable realization, exhausted, Jonathan gives up and begins his commentary, at once to explain and atone: “I never entered into the Valley of Nails not even as unshod as I was, and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains that might have been clouds after all I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed [. . .] When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited, flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another.” Here the book turns to exegesis and metaphor, Hafftka’s paintings growing darker and wilder as the novel grows tighter and clearer, more humbled, more quiet—as if now it knows what it means to say, and what it means to say it: “[. . .] I cleave to this identity for and only for the memory—mine—of my Aba and the Queen. For them how I loved them. And for the expectations they once had for my own memory. Expectations becoming love in their ripening. A memory to be had by others. Becoming. Others I never made in an image I felt becoming the world.”

Like the doomed atmosphere of Prague’s old Jewish Quarter in Paul Leppin’s short story collection Others’ Paradise, the very boundaries of existence at any stage are the subject of myth, and existential ambivalence a form of theology; life is a kind of prayer; and the Jew is a feverish metaphor that bears the brunt of evolution. Now that Leppin’s seedy and labyrinthine world is gone along with Leppin’s own peculiar syphilitic paranoia and the comfort of personal enemies, we are left—Cohen seems to imply—with a stranger and more relative doubt almost as sure as certainty, much as Jonathan is lost and knows he is lost in a heaven he can only intuit. In this utter awareness Cohen offers us perhaps a pure, holy regret for what seems lost forever, but lost only to us, he reminds—the survivors: as the heart of his book is an idea-as-doctrine he calls Maturing to Infinity, or growing ever and ever, a metamorphosis abandoned by theology and teleology both. (Though as Cohen, a writer so aware of etymology would appreciate, Jonathan’s lack of a telos, or end, simultaneously makes him teleos, or perfect—as horrifying as that perfection might be.) The victim is a sacrifice at once trapped and free in his eternal victimhood, forced to change unrecognized, uncounted, and unaccounted for, while at the same time mourned on earth, consecrated as a martyr, and remembered forever as the 10-year-old boy he no longer resembles or knows.

In this vision of endless change above and beyond tradition, however, we may recognize Cohen as Jonathan as an outsider in Israel, and also Cohen as an outsider among his own in America. A heaven of others: the poem not of militant secularism but individual doubt, agnosticism, or Agnon’s—gnosticism, as S.Y. Agnon, too, wrote of tradition amidst modernity and was influenced by German literature and reflected his heart’s philosophy in a necessarily new language; though in the untranslated epigram, Cohen chooses the Hebrew-language poet Saul Tchernichovsky as his shadow Virgil, and the poem “Levivot,” or “Pancakes,” which tells the story of a boy’s trajectory from unquestioning obedience and acceptance—the untranslatable egel melumad, literally “a learned calf” and also the taunt for a yeshiva student—to freedom and, consequently, sacrilege: “having no weapon in its hands/It will cleave to all its persecutors forbid.” Notice the double meaning of this English translation: cleave in the sense of to split and to separate, as well as to join together—“Cleave, which in American means both To rend and To adhere,” as Cohen does, in his faith and faithlessness, holiness and profanity. “In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not [. . .] To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why [. . .]”

It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make [. . .]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished.

Indeed, Cohen’s Israel is in part a Jewish literary graveyard: besides Tchernichovsky Street, there is Antschel’s Funeral Home—Antschel being the birth name of Paul Celan, author of the funereal Todesfuge—and references to Kafka, Haim Nahman Bialik, and a selection of Jewish religious sources from the Old Testament to folklore and legend abound. Still, Cohen finds room for Quranic exegetes, Muslim myths of the afterlife—the Jews become pigs as they ascend to heaven—and the composer Richard Barrett, who has set Celan’s poem “von hinter dem Schmerz” to music. Not quite the Western Lands, Cohen discovers Bialik’s desert, Emanuel Swedenborg’s heaven—and also Swedenborg’s desert, Bialik’s heaven—which is to say the book draws its language from the most expressive of Hebrew poetry and baroque Swedish religious philosophy to create in fiction a personal mythology, always attentive, always delimiting and defining, always unorthodox, but so steeped in its traditions that it reads as modern and classic as, say, Kafka’s account in Amerika of America. Only whereas Kafka wrote of one place he had never seen, Cohen, an American Jew, writes of two—making Israel foreign to Israel and heaven foreign to all except those with an intimate knowledge of German poetry, Hebrew scripture via the King James Bible, and 14th-century Muslim religious tracts, in the hope of bringing these loci to light anew and writing intelligently about subjects so familiar to us, at all. (It would be interesting to know, for example, how this book about latter-day terrorism might be received in Israel, where Cohen, though Jewish, would certainly be seen as an outsider in a local debate.) After the intimate and bittersweet homecoming of the virtuoso Laster’s showbiz Yiddish in his first novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, in which the aforementioned violin prodigy improvises a novel about his friend—the missing composer, survivor, and misanthrope Schneidermann—from the stage of Carnegie Hall as his cadenza, or solo, Cohen explored his other roots: the Europe and South Jersey of his immediate family, and the unsolved mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, again with Hafftka). While both books were departures from his modest first collection of stories, The Quorum, here, in his latest novel, linguistic and symbolic estrangement become a means to enlightenment—a ladder rather than a path, which, once climbed, leads to the dream of a dream, isolating the past, and epitomizing the present. The voice of reportage we trust to guide us through the Paradiso is even more guileless and haunting here, more alive in the memory of an unsuspecting boy, and so therefore more revealing of everything holy and unholy which we hold dear, despite: life, as Stanley Elkin says—death’s alternative.

And yet if A Heaven of Others is Cohen’s most political and topical book, it is also his best effort at pure storytelling, a tale as instructive as it is tall, an allusive novella in the voice of a poem with the power and richness of a full novel—and not the kind with a lot of dialogue in it. Like a sign upon the hand and between the eyes, Jonathan’s post-mortem account of his “Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven” serves to remind us of what literature was once like before it was cast out of an amateur’s Eden and banished forever into the marketplace: a commentary, that is, in conversation with other literature, about their mutual meditations on the original Word—a dialogue in the form of a confession less flagellating than the famous self-interrogations of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. One of the great joys of this book, and one of its fortunes, is the transparency of its influences, the legibility of its inspiration. As the story of an individual in the modern world and beyond, the book eschews politics for a skeptical ethics based less in an abstract humanism than in the personal desire to choose the face by which society knows us: The only hope we can have in a world in which our very names make us targets is the hope of free expression, in word and deed; and as the state is only a continuous ruin, memory is the property of the one who remembers—though other victims be lost to television and forgotten by the world.

Perhaps nothing written since Kafka quite conveys the arbitrary cruelty and absurdity of a world such as this in the most proximate human terms, and the inner sense, or intuition, of a soul that mediates between. In fact, now that so much Jewish literature has been written and rewritten again in English, now that we have so many authors and classics, it is all the more rare and inspiring that Cohen, scandalously overlooked in America, especially by the Jewish literary community—the novel is timestamped almost four years ago, in 2004—continues to delve deeper and further with each book into an inherited terrain while making of that holy ground these beautifully uncharted territories with their own maps and legends. (It did not come as a surprise that, according to his website, Cohen has just finished an 800-page novel about the last Jew on earth, called, blasphemously: Graven Imaginings.) “How did I get here, if I am still an I” Jonathan asks in the opening sentence, and is mocked in a kind of Yiddish by the narrator, who is himself: “He got here how he got here.” At once terrifying and singular and singularly important, A Heaven of Others repeats and channels the echo of that initial question, forcing us to see ourselves between destinies, between politics and political persuasions, and between answers themselves, to ask in fact who and what we really are: how did we get here, that is, if we are to remain an I?

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn.

Logorrhea

Edited by John Klima (Bantam Spectra, 2007)

Literary genres are blending together these days, as mainstream writers use tried and true genre elements while genre writers break out into the mainstream world. Still, the concept behind the short-story anthology Logorrhea is odd: Each writer in the anthology chose one word that was spelled correctly to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee and wrote a short story based around it, a concept that neither screams out for a genre nor provides an obvious avenue for mainstream writing. Most of the writers in the anthology are familiar to a science-fiction audience, though many of them are also known specifically for treading genre borders, and Logorrhea’s editor, John Klima, edits a science fiction magazine called Electric Velocipede. But there’s work inside to please both genre purists and a wider audience; really, it is only the sheer, dizzying ability of the volume’s writers that make such a strange theme work at all.

Michael Moorcock and Theodora Goss are two of the biggest names in speculative fiction, and may be the reason a lot of people pick up this book. Goss gives us a fable set in China and Moorcock has a slim tale about his most famous creation, Elric of Melniboné; both of these are pleasant enough, but nothing to hang their reputations on. It's the young, hungry writers who provide the book's real meat: Hal Duncan’s “The Chiaroscurist” is a haunting meditation on art and Daniel Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” is delightful. The title tale, by Michelle Richmond, is a weird, heartrending love story between a man covered in hard scales and a woman who can’t shut up. And “The Last Elegy,” by Matthew Cheney [also a New Haven Review contributor—ed.], is somber and beautiful, probably the best work in the book. In short, there’s more than enough here to make the anthology worth reading, praising, and treasuring, even if you find the premise less than eudaemonic (winning Scripps Spelling Bee word, 1960).

Eric Rosenfield was born and raised in New Haven and blogs at Wet Asphalt.

The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life

By Floyd Skloot (University of Nebraska Press, 2008)

At the age of forty-one, Floyd Skloot was stuck with static dementia, a virally induced brain disease. Unable to write, struggling to grasp simple sentences, not capable of remembering new facts, fitfully recalling old ones, he was in “neurological tatters.” Yet in a blessed irony, loss of memory led to memoir. Skloot was already the author of half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, but now the holes in his cerebral cortex led him to return to his past and, in this volume, his fourth memoir, he recounts the experiences and habits which have made him into “the sort of person who could only deal with what happened to him by writing about it.”

In The Wink of the Zenith, Skloot revisits his childhood, his father’s poultry market, his parents’ unhappy marriage, the family’s move from Brooklyn to Long Island, and their subsequent move to Queens after his father’s death. Traveling the world in search of a new beau, his mother would leave young Floyd, now fifteen, at home for months. Enrolled in a cooking class (taught by his football coach) sophomore year, the rapidly maturing Skloot learns, through experience and failure, not to do things like throw all the food in the pot at the same time, and, more important, how to take care of himself.

Even better than the tales is the pitch in which Skloot sings them. His sensibility is stoic and gentle. The style is clear, supple, expressive, and, one can't help but get the feeling, wise as well. Skloot’s work has been unjustly neglected for years; this volume yet again insists that a little more recognition come his way.

All-American Poem

By Matthew Dickman (American Poetry Review, 2008)

I first encountered Matthew Dickman’s “Trouble” in a recent issue of The New Yorker. It’s a litany of the many ways famous people killed themselves. Marilyn Monroe took sleeping pills. Marlon Brando’s daughter hanged herself. Bing Crosby’s sons “shot themselves out of the music industry forever.” The list’s utilitarian feeling only makes the horror more horrible, especially when it includes the suicide of Dickman’s brother: He “opened thirteen Fentanyl patches,” Dickman tells us, “and stuck them on his body until it wasn’t his body anymore.”

But there’s a sense of humor too, even whiffs of whimsy, which make the tenor of All-American Poem, in which “Trouble” appears, feel genuine without being sappy. The poems are lucid and coy, rambling and drunk, playful and gregarious, a tapestry of emotion with a notable thread missing: There’s little in the way of satire or irony, by which I mean meanness of spirit. Written amid the anxieties and neuroses of the Bush era, Dickman’s poems are conspicuous for their lack of bitterness. After learning about his brother’s fate, we learn: “I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears.” How random. How charming.

And how frightening, too. For “Trouble” also recalls Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which suffering consumes those experiencing it while the rest of us appear cruel without meaning to. For the tortured, nothing else matters but the torturer, even as his “horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” Life goes on despite that tiny shudder that comes from knowing that as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is in pain.

But where Auden seems intent on forcing on us the aloofness of the cosmos, Dickman’s “Trouble” levels a cool eye while making a little room by the fire. His might be called gallows humor, but somehow it’s never macabre. It’s intimate and warm, friendly and firm. A tragic view of the world, but maybe also optimism in disguise.

In the introduction to All-American Poem, Tony Hoagland rightly calls the book the “epitome of the pleasure principle,” and there are lusty, earthy poems contained within, stuffed with images, metaphors, and jokes that delight more than instruct. But they also affirm an old-fashioned sentiment that right now seems to be much in need in America right now. I’m talking about the human spirit.

There’s a line in Richard Greenberg’s 2003 play, The Violet Hour, in which a flamboyant clerk riffs on the word “gay.” It’s 1919, way before the word took on its present meaning, so “to be gay is not to be frivolous,” he says proudly. “To be gay is to be light-hearted in the face of every kind of darkness.”

Toughness with a smile. But Dickman isn’t afraid of darkness. In “V,” the world’s “been talking sleazy to all of us and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb that makes me want to wear a cock ring in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.” The speaker wants to flirt with a girl, but reconsiders. Maybe she wants to be treated as a human being, not an animal at the meat market: “And maybe this is not a giant leap into the science of compassion, but it’s something.”

Happiness can be an act of will as much as an accident of fate. It’d be natural to let the light die behind your eyes in the wake of losing a brother, or your house. But to be “gay”—and in Dickman’s case, to be funny and charming and witty—is almost an act of rebellion. To be “gay” in the world of All-American Poem is be totally punk rock.

Though there’s no sign Dickman sees it that way: He breathes the air of Whitman, Kerouac, O’Hara, and Koch, each of whom pushed against the grain of what poetry and writing was supposed to be in their times. Especially Koch, who saw no reason why poetry couldn’t be fun. The first line of Dickman’s “Chick Corea Is Alive and Well!” is “Which makes the elegy I wrote for him seem a little distasteful.” And the last line isn’t afraid to flirt with sentimentality, because it’s a sensibility rooted in the here and now, and it feels right: The jazz pianist is like “a man whose been raised from the dead, looking down at a woman’s knees after years in the dirt, singing yeaahh! yeaahh! This is what I’m talking about, yeaahh! This good, sweet life!”

John Stoehr is the arts editor at the Charleston City Paper.

Funny Westlake Is Missing

Or, Donald Westlake, R.I.P.

Death is the common currency of popular mystery fiction. So we shouldn’t be so shocked when the major practitioners of the form happen to die. At least they weren't murdered.

Still, the death of Donald Westlake feels like a mortal blow to the entire mystery genre. He was an exemplary chronicler of witty, breezy, American bank heists or other escapist capers for half a century.

Westlake wasn’t a household name like Gregory MacDonald (the former Boston Globe columnist who created the Fletch and Flynn series) or Hartford's Hillary Waugh (credited with pioneering the modern police procedural), both of whom died last year. He certainly wasn’t on the level of longtime Weston, Conn., resident Ed McBain, who was still churning out a book or three a year right up to his death in 2005 at age 78. (Actually, the real household name among mystery writers would have to be Geoffrey Household, the British thriller author, but I digress.)

But to those who wallow constantly in the genre, Westlake was as inescapable as a locked-room conundrum. He operated at both ends of the spectrum, cheap and classy. His bibliography exceeds a hundred titles. He further labored under several pseudonyms, Richard Stark being the most notable. But despite his steady success as a novelist, he continued to publish short stories in seemingly any fiction magazine that would have him. The quality level of the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines were assured by the regularity of Westlake’s contributions to them.

One of the last mystery authors old enough to have experienced the post-war transformation of the mystery novel into a pop culture phenomenon, thanks to innovations in paperback printing, Westlake filled the public trough. But his work was fine enough to catch the attention of filmic interpreters of the level of Costa Gavras (The Couperet, from Westlake’s The Ax), Jean-Luc Godard (Made in the USA, from Westlake’s The Jugger) and such A-list stars as Lee Marvin (Point Blank), Mel Gibson (Payback) and Robert Redford (Cops and Robbers). Westlake’s own screenplay for The Grifters, which he adapted from the Jim Thompson novel, was nominated for an Academy Award and lifted the careers of John Cusack and Annette Bening.

Westlake’s weakest books are as enlightening for involved readers as are his best. At his worst, he was simply guilty of getting too stuck to a format and filling in gaps with too much idle chatter and silly jokes. There is, nonetheless, artistry in that. At his best, he bent the rules for linear mystery storytelling, creating characters which were more interesting than the contrived situations they were thrust into. His talent was more for humor than humanity, but his desire to flesh out stereotypical cop and robber characters with amusing quirks and idiosyncracies set him apart. Part of an eager breed of prolific paperback writers who ruled late-20th-century pop fiction and who at times seemed interchangeable, Westlake was also a unique voice, furthering the mystery craft by never taking it too seriously.

A God's Breakfast

By Frank Kuppner (Carcanet, 2004)

Beware the writers who give you what you want. Like the gregarious person at a party who immediately compliments your shirt, the over-accommodating writer, so pleasing at first, may in fact have nothing much to say. So in reading the poems of Frank Kuppner, whose charm is a very easy one, you may be on your guard. When he has a good line, he isn’t shy about it: “If I weren’t myself, I would like to be Bias of Cyrene,” he writes, “assuming that Bias of Cyrene himself wouldn’t mind, of course.” His wit is effortless to smile at, so you might resist smiling. But what can you do if the author possesses, as Kuppner does, a wit that is tireless, diverse in means, deep in learning, and abundantly delightful?

A God’s Breakfast consists of three fully developed book-length poems containing so many varieties and shades of humorous ingenuity that wariness of his charm must quickly be replaced by amazement at his gift. He also writes with a marathoner’s endurance. The first section of A God’s Breakfast, “The Uninvited Guest,” consists of over a hundred pages of epigrams (one is quoted above) by an unnamed thinker of the classical world, peppered over by annotations from an equally anonymous modern scholar. The set-up allows Kuppner to trace characters and launch subplots that lead to some brilliant and bizarre turns of phrase. These may be lewd: “A little boy walked past me in the street / With scratches all over him. Hmmm. Zeus, I suppose.” Actually, quite a few are lewd, but just as many make for fair philosophy: “What sort of lunatic would worship a stone? / No-one. It must be something else they are worshipping.” By this hodge-podge technique, the epigrams and their commentary gradually form a composite picture of the learned mind, be it classical or contemporary, and how it ceaselessly flickers with doubt, insight, and silliness.

It’s a democratic point of view: One senses in Kuppner a distrust of things deemed special or impressive. He has Juvenal’s instinct, but he applies it at a deeper and almost empathic level. In the second work of the book, “West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil,” his target is another learned writer, T.S. Eliot. The poem is narrated through Eliot’s droning disembodied voice, as he grapples with his prim Anglicanism, jots down notes on possible rhymes (“we stood together down a deep hole / anguishedly discussing the soul / either that or the sole / near Knole”), and unconsciously channels his own collected works (“so here I sit, an old man with bad teeth”). The tone is unquestionably satirical, but if that were all, it would again be merely what we think we want—to knock Eliot down, to humiliate the mirthless, mincing old poet—and not nearly so satisfying as the actual achievement of Kuppner’s ventriloquism. For every dig Kuppner takes at the master, he allows himself to feel a sad sort of camaraderie. One imagines that if Eliot had just been less lionized, Kuppner would respect him more. So “West Åland” is a corrective; it’s also an assemblage of some lovely and very natural verse. If Eliot had written certain of these lines, there’s no saying if he would have quite been able to throw them away.

In “What Else Is There? 120 Poems,” Kuppner disencumbers himself of the conceits of the previous pages, allowing himself to speak as himself. It’s a freeing switch for the reader as well. The unvarnished Kuppner specializes in humor and metaphysical alienation; his vernacular and down-to-earth attitude is perhaps over-pronounced, but his sureness with the line is moving. The poem “Busy Tram, Löwenbrücke” begins:

All these thousands of people whom one talks to only once. Yes. If even quite that.

A dry hurricane of uniqueness through year after year. Excuse me. And then gone.

Down the roads which only they know.

Kuppner allows the 120 sonnets, dithyrambic meditations, and other varieties of verse to play off each other symphonically, a technique he seems to allude to in the sweet and open final poem, “The Tenth Symphony.” Here, he identifies silence, too, as a vital instrument in all great compositions, and the human urge to locate hope where there is simply the future tense. But Kuppner’s silence in the United States—he is Scottish, and apparently none of his books have been published outside the United Kingdom—has clearly lasted too long. American readers of poetry do not usually shy away from what is plainly wonderful. When will he arrive here?

James Copeland's poems appear in the upcoming issue of 6x6.

Life Among the Savages

By Shirley Jackson (Penguin edition, 1997; orig. pub. Farrar and Rinhart, 1953)

There are scads of books about motherhood out there, and obviously most are crap. I’m okay with that; I know I can always re-read Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. Last week, I sent an email to a friend who was going mad trying to work on a book while tending her two small children. It wasn’t going so well. She described her domestic scene and said, “On days like this, I wish I liked the taste of alcohol.” My immediate response was that she would simply have to find a copy of Life Among the Savages. “When I went into the hospital to deliver our daughter,” I wrote, “I took one – ONE – book with me, and it was Life Among the Savages.”

Shirley Jackson is best known for her creepy fiction. “The Lottery” is one of the most anthologized of short stories; The Haunting of Hill House has been filmed twice. Writers cite her; there’s a literary award named after Jackson. The creepy stuff is fine, I’ve got nothing against it, but for my money Life Among the Savages is Jackson’s masterpiece. Laura Shapiro cites it as a touchstone in the “literature of domestic chaos,” which it is, but to me it’s more than that. Jackson’s fictionalized account of her life with her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, is wise on marriage, on why urbanites don’t belong in Vermont, on cats, on the folly of gun ownership, on children, and on why it is that, when everyone gets sick, blankets will go missing.

Eva Geertz, a bookseller, lives in New Haven.

Three Places to Go to Read About Neglected Books

We’re delighted that we’re not the only literary enterprise on the lookout for under-appreciated books and authors. We’re not even the best or most practiced at the hunt. Here are three places to go to find out about books that have probably flown below, around, or mysteriously through your radar: 1) The Neglected Books Page, http://neglectedbooks.com. If you’re a book lover and haven’t heard of this page, you really ought to be sore with yourself. Not only does it list recently neglected books (how’s that for a concept?), but it delves into neglect of years past, linking to lists like The American Scholar’s “Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,” published in 1970. An old list like that one can be unexpectedly invigorating: it’s good to know that authors like Kate Chopin, Isaiah Berlin, and A.R. Ammons were once considered overlooked, since it means that time does remedy some injustices. It’s impossible to tell from the website who edits the Neglected Books Page, but it’s somebody judicious and industrious, and obviously not in it for the credit.

2) LeeSandlin.com. Many of our readers will know Lee Sandlin from our website’s effusive praise of him — praise that, we have reported before, helped him land a book deal with Pantheon. But Lee is not only a splendid essayist, he is also a champion of neglected books. Check out his list “Ten Novels That Not Enough People Have Read.” (Of the ten authors, we’d heard of one, and thought that maybe we’d heard of a second.) He annotates on the list here.

3) The Believer, annual award issue. This magazine, published by the same people responsible for McSweeney’s, reviews overlooked books in every issue, and once a year it gives out the Believer Book Award, the rubric for which is summed up here: “Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year.” Once again, we’d be surprised if you’d heard of any of the winners. Last year’s was Remainder, by Tom McCarthy.

Long Lost James Thurber/A History of Childrens’ Lit

James Thurber, “The 13 Clocks” (New York Review Children’s Editions, 2008)Seth Lerer, “Children's Literature: A Reader's History” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. Most likely, it was a long, boring summer afternoon at my English grandparents’ Oxfordshire country house. I would have been rambling around the motionless house—where the ticking of an antique clock in the kitchen reverberated through several rooms—looking for a means of entertaining myself. Up two twisty flights of narrow stairs, there was a small garret attic with a large bolt on the outside of the door. Slide the bolt across, click it down and swing open the door, and step into a room lined wall to wall with books. Books! Hundreds of them! For a child like me, the type who had to be told to stop reading in the car so that I wouldn’t make myself sick, it was as rich and mysterious as entering Aladdin’s cave (another story I read in a book I found in that room, the One Thousand and One Nights). And it was on one of my afternoons in this attic that I found the most magical book of all, James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks.

The copy of the book I found there was an old paperback, faded and tattered, that had once belonged to my aunt. It was a book full of dark and stormy. Beside the lilting, poetry-like prose of the story, it had fantastical illustrations in a muted palette of blues, purples and grays. It had obviously been much loved and much read, and I tore through it immediately. Best of all, it was actually two books in one—turn the book upside down, flip it over, and in the back half was The Wonderful O, also by Thurber, a delightful if less enthralling counterpart to the first story.

Then imagine my despair when I returned home that summer and discovered that it was impossible to purchase my very own copy of the book. Not only was the combo 13 Clocks/Wonderful O edition only published in the U.K., both it and the American version of The 13 Clocks had been out of print for years. So even as a so-called adult, I felt a thrill when I heard earlier this year that The New York Review of Books would be re-issuing the original American edition of The 13 Clocks, illustrated by Marc Simont. In a new introduction, prose and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman calls The 13 Clocks “probably the best book in the world,” and rereading it for the first time in a decade, I found it difficult to disagree with him. Ronald Searle, who illustrated the English edition, provided over-the-top illustrations perfect for the absurd, fantastical elements of the tale, but Simont’s simple, flat watercolors capture its quiet lyricism. And while I missed the nostalgia-inducing qualities of my old paperback copy, the new hardcover is a keepsake, with a rich red fabric spine and beautiful title-page illustration of a gloomy castle overlooking a peaceful hamlet.

* * *

The 13 Clocks is a subversion of many of the features of the traditional fairy tale. A valiant prince, initially disguised as a ragged minstrel, rescues a beautiful, bewitched princess—but everything else is somewhat out of the ordinary. The prince, Zorn of Zorna, is aided in his quest by the Golux, born of an ineffectual witch and a drunk wizard. The princess, Saralinda, performs half of what Zorn must do to rescue her. The magic is strictly of the ridiculous variety: when the Golux’s powers fails to start the castle’s dead clocks, Saralinda tells him to use logic instead. “If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them,” the Golux says. “That’s logic, as I know and use it.” Saralinda holds her hands a short distance from the clocks and they whir into life.

Much of the appeal of the book, a key feature of what should have been its staying power, lies in its ability to transcend the children’s-adult lit divide. Akin to The Phantom Tollbooth, one of its chief attractions is a linguistic playfulness that permeates nearly every line. Like the character of the Golux, who introduces himself as “the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device,” the book’s cerebral qualities are not there merely to tickle the intellectual faculty. They draw you into a world where words mean at once many things and nothing at all. From Gaiman’s introduction, again: “While all books are filled with words, this one was different: it was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words.” Words are the true magic and power of the story. Simply mentioning the Todal, the amorphous evil that threatens to “glup” the Duke, causes a lock of a castle guard’s hair to turn white (maybe he should have gone with He Who Shall Not Be Named). And the evil Duke has Saralinda so enchanted that the only thing she can say in his presence is, “I wish him well.” One imagines this is as much to avoid hearing what she would say to him if she could as to keep her from conversing with eligible bachelors.

Thurber lived in Connecticut but wrote The 13 Clocks in Bermuda, and there is a subtle post-modern, post-colonial quality to the work. A definite breakdown between signifier and signified runs throughout the language. Is it really necessary for the Golux to assert that he is the only one in the world? It’s a self-evident assertion: what on earth is a Golux, anyway? Furthermore, he wears an indescribable hat—it can be seen, and felt, but not described (the story goes that Thurber, who had gone blind by the time he wrote the book, knew the illustrations were right when Simont was unable to describe the hat he had drawn). The prince fulfills a prophecy by having a name that both begins with X and doesn’t; in the beginning of the story, he poses as a minstrel named Xingu. And at the end of the story the enraged Duke throws the Golux’s self-assertion back at him, shouting, “You mere device! You platitude! You Golux ex machina!” This may be over the heads of most children, but it’s practically uproarious for a former lit major.

* * *

A delight in the power of language and the tricks of the tongue are also at the heart of Stanford professor Seth Lerer’s Children's Literature: A Reader's History. It’s a thick scholarly tome, but also a charming read that revels in children’s imaginations and the timeless works that stimulate them. Lerer, a medievalist, takes an approach that focuses on the books children have read since ancient times, rather than on what adults have labeled “children’s literature.” He distinguishes “between claims that children’s literature consists of books written for children and that it consists of those read, regardless of original authorial intention, by children.” He details the ways in which many literary productions—Aesop’s fables, King Arthur stories, Robinson Crusoe—move back and forth between adult and child readerships. Here, there is no prescription for what children and adults “should” read, no shame in an abiding love of Little Women or Harry Potter. Lerer emphasizes the quality of good children’s literature that allows it to survive from one historical era to another, and to attract kids and grown-ups alike.

The book’s main attraction is its obvious delight in the subject matter: Lerer perfectly captures the love of literature that usually follows a voracious child reader into adulthood. He evokes the rituals and emotions of reading, describing the pleasures of re-encountering many books through reading to his now-teenaged son. Taking a chronological view of the subject matter, he starts the study in ancient Greece and Rome and continues through to Judy Blume and J.T. Rowling. The work sings through the Classical and Medieval eras, as it explores what and how children read during those periods, focusing especially on the evolution of Aesop’s fables. It has become an axiom that the Victorians “invented” childhood, treating children as special and unique instead of as miniature adults, but Lerer describes the ways that Romans almost revered children and childhood and how that influenced children’s reading. I particularly liked what we could call the revisionist sections, in which the author examines the crossover process for what are now quintessential childhood characters. For example, he writes that in the Middle Ages, “Robin Hood and adventure verse were thought of as corrupting to the child.” But beginning in the Renaissance, people began to see themselves as emerging from the Dark Ages and to construct earlier periods as humankind’s “childhood.” In that process, “medieval literature became children’s literature. It was associated with childishness, error, sloth, idleness and foolery.” Likewise, Robinson Crusoe started out as a novel for adults, an allegory of colonialism, but was quickly edited down into children’s books and rewritten as The Swiss Family Robinson.

Lerer seems most at home when he looks at the interplay between literature for children and adults, noting, for example, the Medieval love for wordplay or how textual marginalia—those weird pictures in a book’s margins—mock chivalry and class hierarchies. But he stumbles when he reaches the nineteenth century and much of what we now consider the classics, from The Wind in the Willows to Alice in Wonderland to Treasure Island. At this point, for some reason, Lerer decides that it is necessary to start classifying the books into “boys’” and “girls’.” He devotes whole chapters to “storytelling for a boy’s world” and “female fiction,” and from the nineteenth century on generally divides works into one of these two camps. For a study that, as he describes at the outset, emphasizes a focus on the reader and what actual children read rather than what adults thought they should read, this strikes me as supremely odd. In the course of these chapters, he takes no time to analyze the categories he has established or ask whether works were as divided by gender as they seem. Other studies, like Hilary Fraser, Judith Johnston, and Stephanie Green’s Gender and the Victorian Periodical, point out that many boys entered the magazine The Girl’s Own Paper’s knitting and sewing competitions, and that The Boy’s Own Paper had female correspondents and readers. As the type of exploratory child reader who would pick up any book whether it was marketed for boys or girls (and this type of marketing still dominates children’s lit), I would have enjoyed a more descriptive analysis of what children actually read, rather than a confirmation of adults’ proscriptive tendencies.

In the book’s introduction, Lerer reminds us of the episode early in The Little Prince when the narrator presents the adults in his life with a picture of a boa constrictor eating an elephant. When he asks them if they find the drawing scary, they reply, “Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?” The implication is clear: although Lerer spends another 300 pages in his discussion of children’s literature, it is only the children themselves who can really understand what makes these books so important and magical. Although I still find The 13 Clocks entertaining and pick up on more of the verbal puns than when I was 10, it’s hard to recapture the excitement and awe of that first encounter. Lerer understands this, and this understanding helps make his book so appealing. As he writes of child readers, “what their stories always tell us is that childhood is an age of the imagination, and that every time we enter into fiction, we step back into a childhood of ‘what if’ or ‘once upon a time.’”

Rachael Scarborough King is a freelance writer and a reporter for the New Haven Register.

Issue 3 Available Now

We are delighted to inform you that Issue 3 of the New Haven Review, featuring essays, fiction, poetry, and photographs from Jim Knipfel, Jess Row, Willard Spiegelman, George Witte, Stephen Ornes, Ian Ganassi, Nick Antosca, Joy Ladin, and Desirea Rodgers is available now. We'll have the entire issue online shortly, but if you'd like to have the actual journal in your hands—which, designed by Nicholas Rock, is truly a thing of beauty—please contact us. We'd love to hear from you. And thanks once again to all our contributors, subscribers, and supporters for making this possible. Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High [the book, out of print]

By Cameron Crowe (Fireside, 1981, out of print)

The wonderfully renovated and highly relevant magazine Harper’s has recently collected articles from its pages into a volume called Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine. The idea, its editor, Bill Wasik, has said, is that in these times we cannot rely on the usual dance between reporter and source, or reporter and press secretaries or corporate spokesmen, to get at the truths that need getting at; we have to do better, and so reporters have to go under deep cover. Think Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickle and Dimed, or Jeff Sharlet in The Family.

We at the New Haven Review are all for conscious journalism (sort of like conscious rap, but with less bass). The more ideas, the more social good, the better. But it would be a shame to lose sight of an allied tradition that is equally vital, if less world-changing, and is often more fun to read: let’s call it submersion-into-adolescent-angst journalism. This would be the tradition of Alexandra Robbins’s Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, which I haven’t read but has a sexy cover, or the aptly named High School, David Owen’s forgotten classic of going undercover at a suburban high school.

The ne plus ultra of all submersion-into-adolescent-angst journalism is Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High — not the movie (though we do love the movie, which featured the best about-to-break-out cast ever: Sean Penn, Anthony Edwards, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, all before they were famous) but the book, based on Crowe’s return to his old high school. The final product, which is sort of novelized journalism, or journalistic fiction (nournalism? jiction?), takes all sorts of liberties with the truth, and it would probably be less of a delightful romp if it hewed to the facts. But if you want a snapshot of SoCal teen life in the late ’70s — sex, abortion, cars, cool tunes, kind bud — written with compassion and an ear for the way kids really talked, this is where to turn.

The book Fast Times at Ridgemont High is one of the great under-appreciated cultural documents of Americana, and the damned thing isn’t even in print any more, hasn’t been for years. Given that Cameron Crowe must have some serious suck in the showbiz world, you’d think it would be in print if he wanted it to be, which leaves us to surmise that he’s ashamed of one of his great creations. So the mediocrity Vanilla Sky lives on on Netflix, but a copy of Crowe’s wicked cool book can’t be found. Spicoli, if he weren’t so stoned right now, would surely be bummed out.

Mark Oppenheimer is putting the finishing touches on his memoir of high school debating, to be published by Free Press. He is also an editor of the New Haven Review.

Aiding Violence

By Peter Uvin (Kumarian Press, 1998)

The various governmental and nongovernmental organizations that practice international development work—USAID, the World Bank, the IMF, sundry UN organs—are often accused of seemingly contradictory things. One critic paints these organizations as deeply cynical, another as imperialist. Still another decries them as hopelessly naïve. But one criticism all sides repeat is that the organizations never seem to ask the hard questions about whether the work they’re doing is, well, working. Are they doing good? Are they doing harm?

This criticism has some validity to it. The debates within the field happen far from the public eye, and when something goes wrong, you don’t often hear anyone say they’re sorry in public. But now and again, you get a peek, a blazing exception. The best example of this I can think of is Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda—a bold, intensely critical, and moving book that still leaves me shaken years after having read it, which is really saying something for a book aimed at specialists in economic development and international affairs.

The popular conception of the Rwandan genocide is that it rose out of nothing: One minute, Rwanda was a relatively peaceful place; the next, it was a bloodbath. That is, of course, untrue, as dozens of books written about it since then can attest (see, in particular, When Victims Become Killers, by Mahmood Mamdani). But there’s a reason that the popular conception persists, and some of it may have to do with the fact that, right up until the machetes came out, Rwanda was considered to be, as Uvin puts it, “a model of development in Africa.”

Uvin is a development specialist himself, who began working in Rwanda in 1991, three years before the genocide began. This fact is extremely important to the criticisms he makes in Aiding Violence, because they’re not condemnations; they’re excoriating self-inquiries of a variety that few people have the guts to muster ever, especially in print. As Uvin writes, while unrest roiled in Rwanda and at its borders and the pieces were falling into place for massacre,

almost none of the foreign experts living and working in Rwanda expected the genocide to occur or did anything to stop it from happening. Up to the last minute, thousands of technical assistants and foreign experts were building roads, extending credit, training farmers, protecting the environment, reorganizing ministries, advising finance officers, and delivering food aid, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—the lion’s share of all government expenditures. For most of these people, up to the end, Rwanda was a well-developing country—facing serious development problems, but dealing with them much more effectively than were other countries.

This contradiction poses profound challenges for anyone who has ever worked with the development enterprise in Rwanda or in Africa in general; for me, it led to a long reflection process, of which this book is the result. What does development mean if a country that is seemingly succeeding so well at it can descend so rapidly into such tragedy? Why did those of us who worked there have no idea that this was coming?

Uvin—rightly, of course—lays the direct blame for the killing on those who perpetrated it. But he never lets himself or his colleagues off the hook:

The process of development and the international aid given to promote it interacted with the forces of exclusion, inequality, pauperization, racism, and oppression that laid the groundwork for the 1994 genocide. In countries such as Rwanda, where development aid provides such a large share of the financial and moral resources of government and civil society, development aid cannot help but play a crucial role in shaping the processes that lead to violence.

And that’s just the introduction. But the book isn’t simply critical; unlike development work’s more blunt detractors, Uvin isn’t trying to tear the organizations down. He’s trying to change the way they operate. By the time you’ve worked through his book—a nuanced and precise account of the way that the international development community related to Rwandan government and society before 1994—if you didn’t agree before, you’ll be nodding in complete agreement at his statement that

all development aid constitutes a form of political intervention … at all levels, from the central government to the local community. Ethnic and political amnesia does not make development aid and the processes it sets in motion apolitical; it just renders these processes invisible.

Uvin’s prescriptions (which he fleshed out in a second book, Human Rights and Development, in 2004) are then an example of policy writing at its best: In his plea “in favor of defining all development, and all development aid, in more holistic and political terms, at both the intellectual and the operational level” and the analysis around it, he sprints far beyond the way the debate is usually framed in popular discourse to a series of conclusions that are as smart as they are practical. And the good news is that it mattered. Uvin—now a dean and professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts—wrote a book that made waves throughout the world of international development and changed the way that aid organizations did their work.

Aiding Violence is thus a great book for nonspecialists who are interested in, and skeptical of, the efficacy of international development and genocide prevention efforts. Uvin’s criticisms are far more devastating than most of what you hear in the mainstream media, but they also offer a way out. Genocide is still with us, still a problem from hell, but Uvin takes his place beside many others who are not only telling us we should do more to stop it, but showing us how.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

Two New Works on Roman Polanski

“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”Directed by Marina Zenovich THINKFilm, 2008

“Polanski: A Biography” By Christopher Sandford Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Probably no one would dispute the three most important facts of Roman Polanski's life: First, in 1943, the concentration-camp incarceration of his father and murder of his pregnant mother by the Nazis — from whom Polanski, then still a boy and essentially on his own, escaped. Second, in 1969, the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family — to whom many journalists wantonly presumed the director, then most recently of Rosemary's Baby, somehow was connected. Last, in 1977, the “unlawful sex” he pleaded guilty to having with a 13-year-old girl — whose subsequent forgiveness still doesn't change the corollary fact that Polanski has since been a fugitive from American justice, self-exiled to Paris indefinitely.

Nor should it be controversial to suggest that these episodes remain inescapably significant to Polanski's filmmaking, just as his work remains inescapably significant to American movies. So what can any new biographical treatment, be it a detail of the life or a full survey, on film or in prose, possibly hope to add? And what does it say that the two most recent efforts get by quite nicely without even interviewing the man himself?

As if faintly anxious about requiring extra justification, both Marina Zenovich’s recent documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, and Christopher Sandford’s new book, Polanski: a Biography, flash their credentials early and often. As it turns out, Sandford’s formerly sealed court transcripts aren't any more revelatory than Zenovich’s familiar ones are cinematic. Yet neither of these new journalistic endeavors seems superfluous, and we're left to decide whether in the final analysis that’s to Polanski’s credit or our shame.

Not so long after the Manson murders made him a pallbearer for American innocence, Polanski found himself officiating the unholy marriage between American jurisprudence and celebrity journalism. Meanwhile he’d managed both to catalyze the visionary, personal filmmaking of 1970s Hollywood and arguably to pilot its irrevocable descent into indulgence. Thus our stance on the man basically comes down to which application of Jack Nicholson we consider more significant to American culture: directing him in Chinatown or borrowing his hot tub to dope and sodomize a minor.

With that in mind, Zenovich wants simply to reiterate that regardless of Polanski’s guilt or guile, his trial was a mockery of justice. That’s thanks especially to absurd encouragement from the testily star-struck judge Laurence Rittenband, for whom the filmmaker proved a formidable goad. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has much damning evidence to present against the media circus.

And Polanski: A Biography has more. One scene Sandford describes is so visually concise that it could have been a cartoon in The New Yorker: “Amidst the commotion,” he writes, “one enterprising young man stationed himself at the front door, selling T-shirts inscribed with the slogans ‘FREE POLANSKI’ and ‘JAIL POLANSKI’.”

In both Zenovich’s film and Sandford’s book, Polanski comes across simultaneously as libertine and fatalist; as outgoing trouper and proud, brilliant creep; and as a major artist superbly matched to the technically sophisticated showmanship inherent to his chosen medium. Both of these accounts, while not approving, necessarily, or even entirely charitable, seem protective of their subject. Which is a little silly: if there’s one thing Roman Polanksi always has been able to do, it’s stand up for himself. This is a man who took it upon himself to clandestinely investigate his wife’s murder, suspecting his own friends enough to gather forensic evidence from them and send it to experts for analysis. This is a man who then got his memorably graphic production of Macbeth bankrolled by Playboy magazine while the actual murderers went to trial. No, we don’t need new biographies to tell us Polanski is chutzpah personified, but of course that’s why he still and always interests us.

As to a context of his films, Wanted and Desired puts forth a few choice clips, then turns the task of synopsis over to the prim Mormon prosecutor Roger Gunson, whose preparation for the Polanski trial included a retrospective of his work — from which Gunson reasonably adduced a thematic through-line of “corruption meeting innocence over water.” (It’s probably as brilliant an aesthetic summary as anyone prosecuting a hot-tub sex scandal will ever hope to contrive.)

Sandford necessarily allows a broader view: “As well as two satanic-cult pictures, his canon includes psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, sometimes concurrently, and a deranged Dracula spoof in which a Jewish vampire hunter, played by Polanski himself, repeatedly peers through a keyhole at a naked woman who happens to be Sharon Tate.” Not to mention an adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s 1946 memoir, The Pianist, for which Polanski became the oldest director ever to win an Oscar, in 2003. Arguably it was precisely that film’s Polanskian detachment that inoculated it against Spielbergian mawkishness.

But by then, Sandford writes, Polanski “enjoyed the kind of public opprobrium not seen since the time, thirty-seven years earlier, when John Lennon had remarked that the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus.’ A few rather desultory public burnings took place of books and posters of The Pianist, though these put the perpetrators in the morally equivocal position of vandalizing what was in effect a memorial to the Holocaust.”

Such is the peculiar power of Polanski, a survivor so tenacious that he overstepped the American myths of survivorship, and accordingly became, as Sandford puts it, “Hollywood's ogre–that necessary figure.”

And so, in both Wanted and Desired and in Polanski, any pretext of new hindsight or of adjusting a cultural reputation seems, however innocuously, specious. Maybe it’s enough just to affirm Polanski’s irresistibly analyzable, ultimately inexhaustible mystique. As the director himself likes to say, in his exaggeratedly exotic accent, after what everyone else on set always figures is a final take, “Fandastic, fandastic! We go again.”

Jonathan Kiefer’s reviews are archived at jonathankiefer.wordpress.com. He reviews for many publications, including SF Weekly and The New Republic.

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NHR party/Palin poetry/NHR author signed to Pantheon

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First things first: the issue #3 launch party will be at Labyrinth Books, 290 York Street, New Haven, from 6pm to 8pm. Please come! Second, we are thrilled that after we wrote about essayist Lee Sandlin, an undiscovered literary treasure, an agent on our email list contacted him, they got together, and now he has a two-book deal with Pantheon. Congratulations! (And glad we could help.)

Finally, a couple weeks back, we put out the call for poems about Sarah Palin. We just had a hunch that out there, somewhere, somebody had decided that Sarah Palin merited verse. A lot of great poems came in, but the sure winner, for dedication if not for quality, has to be the blogger at wittyditty.wordpress.com, who in the past few weeks has turned her (why are we so sure it's a “her”? we could be wrong) blog over to the versified crucifixion of Alaska's leading flutist/politician.

A Time Not Here

With photographs by Norman Mauskopf and an essay by Randall Kenan (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996)

On a slim, black cover floats a young boy’s face; on the spine, the title; on the back, authors’ names. Nothing more. This format proclaims primary loyalty to the photographs inside: more than fifty images of late-twentieth-century African-American life in the Mississippi Delta, bled to the margins of each page. No captions are offered, no explanatory text other than novelist Randall Kenan’s closing essay. But the images accrete, readable as a narrative – or not – and so richly textured that the shadows seem glutinous, the water truly wet, the air humming with the actual noise of a Mississippi night. Three figures stand in river water to their waists: a child robed in white, two preachers robed in black. Hand-lettered signs plead “Jesus Come In My Heart Today Come In To Stay.” A cow skeleton sinks into the mud of a cotton field as night comes on. Kenan’s essay is a nimble, moving meditation that nods to the photographs without circumscribing them: “A boy watches fire,” begins Kenan, “what does he see?”

A Time Not Here is one of a very few books of photography that truly captures the Delta as I, and other Southerners, know it: a place where the night is darker and the heat hotter than anywhere else on earth, where something dangerous and arresting is always happening at the end of that dirt road, behind that church or that deserted storefront, just barely visible from the corner of your eye. You can keep driving past. Or you can choose to look. Just as you keep looking into the boy’s face on the cover, which stares back with an expression mingling weariness, curiosity, openness, wariness, and everything in between.

Amy Weldon, an Alabama native, teaches English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

From Schlub to Stud

By Max Gross (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008)

Quick prefatory remark: a lot of people love Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a book about his inability to write the book he really wants to write, a critical study of D. H. Lawrence. Now, I love OOSR too, but unlike most of its fans, I don’t pretend it’s a brilliant meta-study about writer’s block, the meaning of biography, or obsessive fandom. Rather, I just think that it’s fun to meander with Geoff Dyer because, well, he’s good company. His trivial, time-wasting thoughts aren’t deep: they are just enjoyable to read.

Chuck Klosterman is fun in the same way; a lot of Klosterman is brilliant and hilarious, but even low-grade Klosto is still fun to hang with. So, too, with the best bloggers, whom we enjoy even when they are less than profound.

Add another one to the list: Max Gross, author of From Schlub to Stud, a new memoir of being pudgy, Jew-froed, Seth Rogen–looking, and hapless. Here’s the blog copy, than which I can do no better:

For years after college, Max Gross was a schlubby ne'er-do-well sporting an unwieldy Jewfro. He fought off double-chins and man-boobs. His style of dress was reminiscent of a stoned urban slacker. Young Max Gross truly was hapless in a big city. He was seemingly without luck or hope. He had bedbugs, a bad break-up, and an audit by the IRS that threatened to break his soul.

But he had heart (as well as two nagging parents). When Gross saw the smash comedy Knocked Up, he realized his day might have arrived. All these years of being a world-class schlub would finally pay off. Thinking quickly, Gross wrote an article about the phenomenon and soon found true love.

Not intrigued? Fine. But for those of us without enough hilarity in our lives, this is a book worth owning. And El Schlub-O has a blog worth visiting. And even his publishing house is hilarious — reading the catalogue of Skyhorse Publishing is funnier than all but the best Shouts & Murmurs and Onion articles. One would say that Gross deserves a better, less ridiculous publisher — except the point of his book is that a loser like him really doesn’t. They deserve each other!

Mark Oppenheimer has this article in the latest New York Times Magazine.

Something Happened

By Joseph Heller (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972)

Imagine a book densely packed with and surrounded by mathematics, and it’s unlikely you’ll have imagined a novel. But consider these early lines:

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it.

Few in the world of fiction have tackled the concentrated calculations that inherently saturate the life of the American working man as effectively, universally, humanely, and timelessly as Joseph Heller did in his second book, Something Happened. The creative teams of The Office (both U.K. and U.S.) have a claim on the most recent attempts at this, but even they must pay some debt to Heller’s tight formula of corporate American anguish.

Known almost solely for Catch-22, his debut book dealing with somewhat similar desperate mathematics, but in a severely different tone — more experimental at best and more youthfully overwrought at worst — Heller took thirteen years to finish his sophomore book. Someone once argued that the only way to avoid the stress of writing your second book is by skipping it and immediately writing your third. Whether Heller considered Something Happened his second or third book, I consider it his finest and I seem to be in good company: Kurt Vonnegut considered it Heller’s finest, too.

There is a statistic out there that the average and, to some, ideal American family produces between 2.2 and 2.7 children. I imagine this would include one boy and one girl. What about the fraction? With such chapter subheadings as “I get the willies,” “My wife is unhappy,” “My daughter’s unhappy,” “My little boy is having difficulties,” “There’s no getting away from it,” and “My boy has stopped talking to me,” I think Heller might have had this absurd calculation in mind when he gave his sad sack hero, George Slocum, a third child (of sorts) who lives largely unseen on the top floor of the family home, a terrible manifestation of the lump every quietly desperate man has created for himself — through equal parts stubborn will, careless error, and, ultimately, lack of choice — and is forced to carry forever, caught firmly in his throat.

And that’s just the beginning. When something finally does happen in Something Happened, you may find that life’s sense of humor is one of the few fiercer than Joseph Heller’s.

Jakob Holder is an award-winning playwright who splits his time between Staten Island in New York and Ristisaari Island in Finland. It is, admittedly, an uneven split.