The Poor Mouth

And I’ve read it maybe five or six times at this point: first as a teenager, then again as an undergraduate when I was supposed to be reading other much less funny things, and then again another couple of times while writing a Masters thesis – a terrific wheeze of a Borges/O’Brien comparative reading. And I’ve just now revisited it afresh, partly to reassure myself before writing this piece that it is just as funny as I remember it being. (It is, albeit with the slight caveat that it’s possibly even funnier.) The first time I read it, I was in school, and I remember being confounded by two facts: 1) That it was originally published in 1941 and 2) That it first appeared in Irish as An Béal Bocht. And if there was one thing that was less funny than anything written before, say, 1975, it was anything that was written in Irish.

To fully understand this, I think you would probably need to have some first-hand experience of the Irish educational system. This is a country in which every student between the ages of five and eighteen is taught Irish for several hours a week, and yet it is also, mysteriously, a country in which relatively few adults are capable of holding a conversation in the language in anything but the most stilted, self-consciously ironic pidgin. (After almost a decade and a half of daily instruction in the spoken and written forms of what is officially my country’s first language, just about the only complete Irish sentence I myself can now speak translates as follows: “May I please have permission to go to the toilet, Teacher?” I don’t think I’m especially unusual in this regard, although I’m aware my ability to forget things I’ve learned is exceptional.) I don’t want to get into this too deeply here, except to say that part of this has to do with a kind of morbid cultural circularity: the reason so few people speak Irish outside of classrooms is because so few people speak Irish outside of classrooms, and that there would therefore be few people to speak it to if they did. Also, very little literature gets written in Irish, partly because (for the reasons outlined above), relatively few people are capable of writing it, and also because, if they did, the readership for it would be correspondingly small. And so the stuff that gets taught in schools tends to be a combination of (as I remember it) unremarkable contemporary poetry and psychotropically dull peasant memoir.

The great canonical presence in the latter genre is a book called Peig, the autobiography of an outstandingly ancient Blasket island woman named Peig Sayers, which was dictated to a Dublin schoolteacher and published in 1936. Successive generations of Irish students were forced not just to read this exegesis of poverty and misfortune – over and over and over – but to memorize large chunks of it, later to be disgorged and explicated at the intellectual gun-point of state examination. The memoir begins with Peig outlining what a rigorously shitty time she had of it growing up in rural Ireland in the late 19th century, and this unhappy existence is narrated with a signature flatness of tone that is maintained throughout the whole grim exercise:

My people had little property: all the land they possessed was the grass of two cows. They hadn’t much pleasure out of life: there was always some misfortune down on them that kept them low. I had a pair of brothers who lived — Sean and Pádraig; there was also my sister Máire.

As a result of never-ending flailing of misfortune my father and mother moved from the parish of Ventry to Dunquin; for them this proved to be a case of going from bad to worse, for they didn’t prosper in Dunquin no more than they did in Ventry.

For a teenager, of course, the only appropriate reaction to this stuff is the most inappropriate one, somewhere between stupefaction and manic amusement. As real and as comparatively recent as the history of grinding poverty and oppression in Ireland is, it’s still hard to read this with a straight face – particularly if, as a youth, you had to commit great thick blocks of it to memory. There’s something about the improbable combination of sober causality and delirious wretchedness (“As a result of the never-ending flailing of misfortune”; “a case of going from bad to worse”) that comes on like an outright petition for heartless juvenile ridicule. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” as Nell puts it in Beckett’s Endgame. We should take this point seriously, coming as it does from an old woman who has no legs and lives in a dustbin.

Beckett’s contemporary Flann O’Brien understood this, too: unhappiness is the comic goldmine from which he extracts The Poor Mouth’s raw material. He is parodying Irish language books like Peig and, in particular, Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s memoir An t-Oileánach (The Islander); but in a broader sense, he’s ridiculing the forces of cultural nationalism that promoted these books as exemplars of an idealized and essentialized form of Irishness: rural, uneducated, poor, priest-fearing, and truly, superbly Gaelic.

O’Brien’s narrator, Bonaparte O’Coonassa, is not so much a person as a humanoid suffering-receptacle, a cruel reductio ad absurdium of the “noble savage” ideal of rural Irishness promoted by Yeats and the largely Anglo-Irish and Dublin-based literary revival movement. A lot of the book’s funniness comes from its absurdly stiff language (which reflects an equally stiff original Irish), but that language is a perfect means of conveying a drastically overdetermined determinism – a sort of hysterical stoicism which seems characteristically and paradoxically Irish. The book’s comedic logic is roughly as follows: to be Irish is to be poor and miserable, and so anything but the most extreme poverty and misery falls short of authentic Irish experience. The hardship into which Bonaparte is born, out on the desperate western edge of Europe, is seen as neither more nor less than the regrettable but unavoidable condition of Irishness, an accepted fate of boiled potatoes and perpetual rainfall. “It has,” as he puts it, “always been the destiny of the true Gaels (if the books be credible) to live in a small, lime-white house in the corner of the glen as you go eastwards along the road and that must be the explanation that when I reached this life there was no good habitation for me but the reverse in all truth.”

Like many of the best comedians of prose, O’Brien is a master of studied repetition. Again and again, unhappy situations are met with total resignation, with a fatalism so extreme that it invariably proceeds directly to its ultimate conclusion: death. Early on, Bonaparte tells us about a seemingly intractable situation whereby his family’s pig Ambrose, with whom they shared their tiny hovel, developed some disease or other that caused him to emit an intolerable stench, while at the same time growing so fat that he couldn’t be got out the door. His mother’s reaction to this situation is simply to accept that they’re all going to die from the stench, and that they therefore might as well get on with it. “If that’s the way it is,” she says, “then ‘tis that way and it is hard to get away from what’s in store for us.”

Individual hardships or injustices are never seen as distinct problems to be considered with a view to their potential solution; they are always aspects of a living damnation, mere epiphenomena of “the fate of the Gaels.” It’s a mindset that’s both profoundly anti-individualist and cosmically submissive. The cause of suffering isn’t British colonialism: it’s destiny. On Bonaparte’s first day of school, his teacher beats him senseless with an oar for not being able to speak English, and to impress upon him the fact that his name is no longer Bonaparte O’Coonnassa, but “Jams O’Donnell” – a generically anglicized title the same schoolmaster gives to every single child under his tutelage. When Bonaparte takes the matter up with his mother later that day, she explains that this is simply the way of things. The justice or injustice of the situation doesn’t come into it:

Don’t you understand that it’s Gaels that live in this side of the country and that they can’t escape from fate? It was always said and written that every Gaelic youngster is hit on his first school day because he doesn’t understand English and the foreign form of his name and that no one has any respect for him because he’s Gaelic to the marrow. There’s no other business going on in school that day but punishment and revenge and the same fooling about Jams O’Donnell. Alas! I don’t think that there’ll ever be any good settlement for the Gaels but only hardship for them always.

The assumption that nothing can be done about it, though, doesn’t mean that ceaseless meditation and talk about the suffering of the Gaels is not absolutely central to the proper business of Gaelicism. True Irishness is to be found in the constant reflection on the condition of Irishness. (This is still very much a characteristic of contemporary Irish culture, by the way, but that’s probably another day’s work.) O’Brien’s characters think and talk about little else. Bonaparte, at one point, recalls an afternoon when he was “reclining on the rushes in the end of the house considering the ill-luck and evil that had befallen the Gaels (and would always abide with them)” when his grandfather comes in looking even more decrepit and disheveled than usual.

– Welcome, my good man! I said gently, and also may health and longevity be yours! I’ve just been thinking of the pitiable situation of the Gaels at present and also that they’re not all in the same state; I perceive that you yourself are in a worse situation than any Gael since the commencement of Gaelicism. It appears that you’re bereft of vigour?

– I am, said he.

– You’re worried?

– I am.

– And is it the way, said I, that new hardships and new calamities are in store for the Gaels and a new overthrow is destined for the little green country which is the native land of both of us?

O’Brien uses the term “Gael” and its various derivatives so frequently throughout the book that the very idea of “Gaelicism” quickly begins to look like the absurdity it is. This reaches a bizarre culmination in the book’s central comic set-piece, where Bonaparte recalls a Feis (festival of Gaelic language and culture) organized by his grandfather to raise money for an Irish-speaking university. The festival is, naturally, an exhaustively miserable affair, characterized by extremes of hunger and incredibly shit weather. (“The morning of the feis,” Bonaparte recalls, “was cold and stormy without halt or respite from the nocturnal downpour. We had all arisen at cockcrow and had partaken of potatoes before daybreak.”) Some random Gael is elected President of the Feis, and opens the whole wretched observance with a speech of near perfectly insular Gaelicism:

If we’re truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and reviles the Gaels. There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.

This is followed by more speeches of equal or greater Gaelicism, to the point where a number of Gaels “collapsed from hunger and from the strain of listening while one fellow died most Gaelically in the midst of the assembly.” From a combination of malnutrition and exhaustion, several more lives are lost in the dancing that follows.

O’Brien’s reputation as a novelist rests largely on the postmodern absurdism of The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, with their mind-bending meta-trickery and audacious surrealism. But the essence of his genius was, I think, to be found in his extraordinary mastery of tone, in his skillful manipulation of a kind of uncannily mannered monotony. Repetition and redundancy are absolutely crucial to the comic effect of his prose, and it’s in The Poor Mouth that these effects are most ruthlessly pursued, not least because they are crucial elements of the kind of story he’s parodying here – a life of unswerving and idealized tedium, in which basically the only viable foodstuff is the potato. (Breakfast is memorably referred to as “the time for morning-potatoes.”) There’s a feverish flatness to the narrative tone throughout, a crazed restraint, and a steady accumulation of comic pressure that is like nothing else I’ve ever read. Bonaparte’s recollection of his first experience with alcohol – in the form of poitín, which is of course the potato fermented to the point of near-lethality – is one of the stronger examples of this in the book. It’s also, I think, probably the greatest of O’Brien’s many great comic riffs:

If the bare truth be told, I did not prosper very well. My senses went astray, evidently. Misadventure fell on my misfortune, a further misadventure fell on that misadventure and before long the misadventures were falling thickly on the first misfortune and on myself. Then a shower of misfortunes fell on the misadventures, heavy misadventures fell on the misfortunes after that and finally one great brown misadventure came upon everything, quenching the light and stopping the course of life.

The effort to identify the comic operations of any given piece of writing – what its technology consists of, how its moving parts fit together – is essentially a mug’s game. There’s a hell of a lot to be said for just accepting that something is funny because it makes you laugh. But there’s something about the flawlessness of this passage’s mechanism that makes me want to take it apart and lay out its components. Obviously, repetition is the primary engine here – just the sounds of the words “misadventure” and “misfortune” in such close succession is powerfully amusing. And, as with the spookily O’Brien-esque passage above from Peig, there’s the mix of sober causality and delirious wretchedness. Accumulation and enumeration is, as always with this writer, an irresistible comic force. But I think the real stroke of genius here – the element that really elevates it to the level of the sublime – is how he keeps going well past the point where the joke has done its job. The funniest word here, in other words – the word that always tips me over into literal LOLing whenever I read it – is “Then …”

And maybe this is funny precisely for the least funny of reasons: because misery and misadventure rarely stop at the point where their work is done. Even when misfortune – or life, or history – has already made its irrefutable point, there’s never anything to prevent it taking a quick breath and starting a new sentence: “Then …”

Image via Wikimedia Commons

It must have been a week or so before that, when my friends and I were huddled in the very back corner of Greenlight Bookstore here in the middle of Brooklyn, just a few feet from the stockroom, so many shelf-lined antechambers away from the man that we may as well have been in a different city, listening to him read a teasing bit of “Escape from Spiderhead” and answer questions over the PA system, and the first one was that old chestnut, where’s the novel we’ve all been waiting for?, and after he said that he lacked the momentum to “accrue pages” — “I think of my stories as kind of like those little toys and you wind ’em up and put it on the floor and it goes under the couch” — the guy beside me let out this soft, disappointed sigh, like he’d just learned exactly why his child had been sent to the principal’s office, or he was watching the scene in a movie where two lovers fated to die come this close to finding each other — but not quite.

The hype surrounding Tenth of December in the early days of the calendar year was kind of staggering. I nodded along: yeah, I’d seen that big piece in the Times magazine, the sheer bravado of the title — “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year” — and sure, I would read it (I hadn’t yet, then). It was the article that Saunders himself credited for the crazy turnout at Greenlight that evening, in an admission of extreme modesty that was both believable and charming (because it was that very piece that’d rightly asserted that “for people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero”).

The backlash followed not long afterwards: a dust-up when it was suggested that someone who can’t seem to accrue enough pages to pen the Great American Novel couldn’t actually be considered the writer of our time. The whole debate volleyed around the bookish corners of the Internet for a few days, one of those weird, insular, overly prescriptive bouts of literary navel-gazing. Whatever, I said. The conversation was an irrelevant one. I loved George Saunders. I was going to love this book.

Because I’d read a few of Saunders’s stories before and I’ve been known to bestow the same superhero-worship on him that a lot of people do. Something about the first story I’d ever read of his — a photocopy of “Sea Oak” during a fiction workshop my senior year of college, probably one of the most important things that I read that semester, so startling and dizzyingly well-executed that it made me want to do what I want to do with most perfect short stories: pull them apart, figure out how the trick was pulled off, the three-minute train-platform confession, I guess, because I suspected then (and know for certain now) that I’m not one of those people that can put together a proper short story, or, at the very least, spin out something that feels, on the surface, so crazily effortless.

(I came home that summer and handed my mother the photocopy of “Sea Oak,” insisting that she read it. But my reading recommendations to her have historically been almost universally selfish: I press a book on her because I’ve loved it, not because I think there’s something in particular that would compel her to it, and most of the time she likes my suggestions — they’re usually good books! — but sometimes, well. She’s very diplomatic. She didn’t say anything about “Sea Oak” for a long time, and I thought that she hadn’t gotten to it yet, until one day I asked her, and she quietly affirmed that she’d finished it. Well? “It was…disturbing,” she said slowly, and it was then that I remembered that there was more to it than being an immaculately crafted short story — it was also about a zombie, basically, a dead woman reanimated, her body parts dropping off one by one as she nags her descendants into getting their lives in order. A fair point!)

But here’s the thing: I bought and began to read Tenth of December and faltered a bit before pushing through to the end — because I don’t actually love it. I’ve been picking it up and putting it back down since I saw, or rather, heard Saunders read aloud — since January! All of 2013! — which feels kind of stupid, because it’s not terribly long and it’s not all that technically challenging. On a page-to-page, sentence-to-sentence level, it’s often a delight, equal parts wry humor and gentle pathos: a joke, a pop song, a speech on a train platform. In other contexts, I’m always happy to see his byline. It’s a respite, tucked between the heavy reporting and critical rancor in The New Yorker; it’s a relief, wedged in amongst the largely dreary and neurotic stuff that’s made up the recent “Best American” anthologies. But stories that I’d read before felt weirdly stifled stacked up on top of each other. An entire book of them, back to back — it’s hard to explain it, but for me, trying to read them one after another often felt like trying to take in all the air in the room at once. It’s impossible to take a proper breath when your lungs are already full.

Why, though? If it’s so important to me to figure out how these stories work, it feels similarly important to understand how the sum of their parts seems to fall short. I felt, at times, that the stories themselves were unevenly matched: big famous ones, like the two bookends, “Victory Lap” and the final, eponymous story, shine so brightly that some of the others feel like paler echoes. And then there’s the literal echo — Saunders’s language, the tricky rhythm of modern colloquialisms that’s often so beautifully awkward — in the words of that Times piece, it’s frequently “a kind of heightened bureaucratese” — can feel gimmicky in story after story, the sheen wearing off a bit. These criticisms — the pace, the shtick —  are ones I and many, many others have leveled before all sorts of short story collections — and it’s there that we loop back around to the silly question of whether a writer who only produces short stories can really be considered the pinnacle of the profession. The question makes me cringe, for reasons I can’t quite articulate — maybe it’s because it does feel like a weird, insular, overly prescriptive bout of literary navel-gazing. Or maybe it’s because I’m beginning to suspect that it’s true.

A few weeks ago, I started from scratch: I picked up the book again, with a little more restraint, and began reading the stories one at a time, spaced apart, in small doses. If they were carefully arranged in a particular order, I’ve ignorantly stomped all over that: I started with the last, Tenth of December, and all that superhero-worship came rushing back. It has occurred to me many times that my opinions of the book — and of Saunders’s work more generally — are not particularly sophisticated bits of criticism. It’s barely criticism at all — it’s gut reaction and instinct. So it’s only fitting that by carefully rereading the collection, I’m slowly falling in love again. Some of it’s incredibly funny, but I’m more interested in how heartbreaking much of it is, eight pages to make someone cry, and now here’s me, crying on the subway. Mission: accomplished.

“The foam was on the lager.”
Now that Brooklyn is, by acclamation, the coolest place in the universe, it’s fitting that one of the borough’s literary lions is enjoying a week in the spotlight. The Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge Festival, which runs until Sunday, May 19, is a week-long celebration of the life and writing of native son Henry Miller, who spent the first years of his life in Williamsburg, in a three-story apartment building that’s still standing at 662 Driggs Ave. The Miller family occupied the top floor from 1892, the year after Henry’s birth, until 1900, when the respectable German-American Millers moved further inland to Bushwick to get away from the new arrivals pouring across the river from Manhattan, mostly Italians and Jews.

Today the 600 block of Driggs Avenue carries only faint echoes of Miller’s boyhood. No plaque commemorates his time there. Haberman’s noisy tin factory behind the apartment building is long gone. So are the tailor shop and veterinarian’s office across the street, and Pat McCarren’s saloon at the corner, where young Henry was sent to fetch pitchers of beer whenever relatives visited. ”The foam was on the lager,” as Miller later wrote about the Williamsburg of his youth, “and people stopped to chat with one another.”

That world is gone, but no matter. Miller’s spirit still hovers over the streets of Williamsburg, which is why it was chosen as the site for this week’s festival by the Henry Miller Memorial Library of Big Sur, Calif., where Miller lived from the 1940′s until the mid-1960s, after his long-banned masterpiece, Tropic of Cancer, was finally published in the U.S. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the novel was not obscene and could no longer be banned. Nearly a half-century after that historic ruling, the Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge Festival has a pop-up bookstore in Williamsburg featuring Miller manuscripts, letters, watercolors, and first editions; there are also panel discussions, readings, and comedy and musical performances.

All of it made me stop and wonder: Does Henry Miller deserve such fuss?

“A life without hope, but no despair.”

Like many avid, life-long readers – particularly those of the American male persuasion – I went through a Henry Miller phase. Mine started late, after the peak of Miller’s fame and notoriety in the 1960s and ’70s. But my Miller phase proved to be more protracted and intense than most.

It started, appropriately enough, in Paris, where I had gone to live in 1979 because I’d fallen in love with a woman who was in school there and I thought it would be a fine place to finish writing an apprentice novel I’d been working on for several years. I was a walking cliche! – an American in Paris, suffering gorgeously, trying to write the great American novel in a seedy top-floor apartment that could fairly be called a garret. The whole thing was a fiasco. The writing wasn’t going well and I was constantly worried about money. One raw winter day, feeling utterly defeated, I knocked off work early, drew a hot bath, and slipped into the tub with a book chosen at random from the stack on the coffee table. It was Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, a book I had somehow managed to miss during the high season of the sexual revolution. Reading the opening lines was like sticking my finger into a wall socket:

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

It is now fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hope. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am.

What the fuck was this? I couldn’t say for sure. All I knew was that I had stumbled onto writing that was unlike anything I had ever read before, writing that spoke directly, almost weirdly, to my predicament, writing that had no use for plot, drama, foreshadowing, character development – all the writerly tricks that marked the “serious” fiction I’d been reading all my life. Instead of a conventional hero, there was just this American nobody shambling around the shabby back streets of Paris in the 1930s, dead broke, cadging money and drinks and meals and sex. The book’s second page hinted at what I was in for:

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in an ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty….

I couldn’t stop reading. The language was bewitching, a wised-up slang Miller picked up on the streets of Brooklyn and then burnished to a ribald, hallucinatory glow. Wherever he goes, Miller’s protagonist, known only as Joe, encounters a gallery of colorful misfits. They have false teeth and halitosis, their hands sweat, they fret about syphilis and lice and the clap. They visit “joints” and “dives” and pour out rivers of “flapdoodle” and “flummery.” They’re a bunch of “butter-tongued bastards” who “fulminate” and “bombinate” and “cluck like a pygmy.” Every now and then they “throw a fuck” into a “cunt.” The sex – the thing that would make Miller famous, to his undying chagrin – is graphic, ubiquitous, usually casual (or paid for up front), and frequently hilarious. One day Joe agrees to take a distinguished Hindu visitor to a whorehouse, where the guest, unfamiliar with French plumbing, proceeds to drop a pair of “enormous turds” in the bidet. The girls and the madam are horrified. Pandemonium ensues.

But those two turds lead Joe to a liberating epiphany about the utter hopelessness of human life:

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders… I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.

A bit later he adds this refinement to the epiphany about the new world he has entered: “A world without hope, but no despair.”

In the end Miller, through his stand-in Joe, fulfills the promise of the book’s opening lines. He delivers that gob of spit in the eye of modern civilization and its empty promises to improve the human race. ”The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left,” he declares. “Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?” Delivering that gob of spit is an act of stupendous bravery because it requires a willingness to forego creature comforts and illusions and become a nobody. Better to be broke in Paris, Joe says, than to go back to America “to be put in double harness again, to work the treadmill.” It was this stance, as much as the writing itself, that turned me into a Henry Miller fan. Few possess his courage, his willingness to walk away from the American dream and embrace a life without hope. Fewer still manage to be what Miller claimed to be in the face of hopelessness – always merry and bright.

In the course of the next decade I would read every Miller title and interview I could get my hands on. But first I did something that would have appalled Miller: I pulled the plug on my failed Paris experiment and went back to America to work the treadmill, taking a job as a newspaper reporter in Norfolk, Va.

“Thomas Aquinas spoke here!”
Six months into the job, on the morning of Monday, June 9, 1980, I walked into the newsroom and learned that Henry Miller had died over the weekend in Pacific Palisades, Calif., at the age of 88. I felt a powerful need to write something about Miller for the next day’s paper, but I knew the skeptical city editor would demand a “local angle.” I paced and fretted. From what I knew, Miller had never set foot in that Virginia backwater. Then I remembered meeting Huntington Cairns, a writer and art critic who had worked at the Library of Congress for many years and was a long-time friend and supporter of Miller’s. Cairns was then living in retirement on the nearby Outer Banks. To my surprise, the city editor told me to go ahead and give Cairns a call. My story appeared in the next day’s paper under the stirring headline “Miller Is Extolled as Serious Artist.” It began:

Huntington Cairns, a citizen of the world who lives in Kitty Hawk, N.C., remembers walking to work in Washington years ago when an old friend  approached.

It was Henry Miller, the writer.

“He said he wanted to go to a whorehouse,” Cairns recalled Monday. “I asked him what kind. He said he didn’t want to go to any ordinary one. He wanted to go where the senators went.”

Later in the article Cairns offers an assessment that I have come to agree with: Miller was a serious writer. He may not have been a great writer – in a league with Tolstoy – but he was an interesting writer and he was not writing pornography. He wanted the freedom to write his own view of the world as he saw it. And he was a hard-working man. He worked all day. He knew Paris like I know the palm of my own hand. We would pass a corner and he’d say, “Thomas Aquinas spoke here!”

A few years later I was working as a morning-drive disc jockey in Nashville and spending my free afternoons struggling to write a novel about a frustrated writer who’s working as a Nashville disc jockey and struggling to write a novel about his literary hero, Henry Miller. My phase was at its zenith. One day Miller, dead a half dozen years by then, walks into my fictional disc jockey’s apartment and strikes up a conversation, just like that. The two become fast friends. Pandemonium ensues.

My working title for the novel was The Colossus of Music City, a nod to The Colossus of Maroussi, still one of my favorite Miller books. One editor who turned down the manuscript wrote that my ghostly version of Miller “is certainly a lovable character – like a favorite uncle who drinks too much and whores around.” He may have been lovable, but not lovable enough. The novel failed to sell.

My own private Henry Miller Library.

“The most boring businessman you can imagine.”
My Henry Miller phase began to fade after that. I’d read more than a dozen of his books – fiction and non-fiction, famous and obscure, wise and pedantic – before coming to the last straw, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

It was begun in 1941, after Miller had enjoyed a richly prolific decade. Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring came steaming straight from the gutters of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Paris after Tropic of Cancer. Then it was on to Greece, where Miller wrote a sun-splashed ode to the sensuous life and a bon vivant named Katsimbalis. It is, along with Cancer, my favorite of Miller’s books. In Paris and Greece he was living off the cuff, far from his despised hometown and homeland, and as a result the writing was unfettered and full of joy.

But Europe was sliding into the abyss and Miller narrowly slipped from under the gathering war clouds and returned, reluctantly, to the U.S. The gloom descended as soon as he boarded the American boat in Piraeus. “I was among the go-getters again,” he wrote, “among the restless souls who, not knowing how to live their own life, wish to change the world for everybody.”

After arriving in New York, he decides to take a cross-country road trip and record his impressions of a country he hasn’t seen in more than a decade. Face-to-face again with his countrymen, his guts get all wadded up and the writing becomes pinched and cranky. Worse, Miller makes the fatal mistake of buying into the claptrap that the artist is some sort of exalted figure, entitled to special treatment, immune to the rules and responsibilities that govern the rest of society:

Like every other big city in America New Orleans is full of starving or half-starved artists. The quarter which they inhabit is being steadily demolished and pulverized by the big guns of the vandals and barbarians from the industrial world… When the beautiful French Quarter is no more, when every link with the past is destroyed, there will be the clean, sterile office buildings, the hideous monuments and public buildings, the oil wells, the smokestacks, the air ports, the jails, the lunatic asylums, the charity hospitals, the bread lines, the gray shacks of the colored people, the bright tin lizzies, the stream-lined trains, the tinned food products, the drug stores, the Neon-lit shop windows to inspire the artist to paint. Or, what is more likely, persuade him to commit suicide.

The only thing missing from this unimaginative litany is cellophane.

Years after I read the book I learned that Miller had neglected to mention a telling encounter he had on his trip across the country. His editor in New York had arranged for him to visit Eudora Welty at her home in Jackson, Miss., and Miller took it upon himself to write her a letter in advance, letting her know that he could put her in touch with “an unfailing pornographic market” that paid a dollar a page. What would possess a man to make such an offer to a very proper Southern lady? I can only assume it was the bad boy’s eagerness to shock, to uphold the naughty reputation cemented by the still-banned but widely circulated Tropics books.

Whatever his reasoning, the visit to Jackson was a disaster and there is no mention of it in the book. As Welty later said, “We drove around in the family car. I took him all around. He was infinitely bored with everything.” After Miller left town, Welty called him “the most boring businessman you can imagine.”  Businessman.  Ouch.

“Must We Burn Henry Miller?”
A lot of women readers besides Eudora Welty have had trouble with Miller’s sexual candor, seeing it not as a badge of liberation but as the demeaning handiwork of a sexist at best, a misogynist at worst. By the time my Henry Miller phase came and went, he and his work had already been fed through the meat grinder by second-wave feminists, most notably Kate Millett in her 1970 book Sexual Politics, in which she castigates Miller along with D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer. ”Miller is a compendium of American sexual neuroses,” Millett wrote, “and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them.”

I agree. I suspect Miller agreed too. Erica Jong, author of the very Miller-esque novel Fear of Flying, definitely agrees.  In an essay called “Must We Burn Henry Miller?” in her 1993 book The Devil at Large, Jong argues that Miller was not an enemy of women in general and feminists in particular. “Ultimately,” Jong writes, “Miller can be a stronger force for feminists than for male chauvinists. His writing consistently shows a ruthless honesty about the self, an honesty that even women writers would do well to emulate, because honesty is the beginning of all transformation.” Then Jong poses a rhetorical question to her fellow feminists: “Shall we burn Henry Miller? Better to emulate him. Better to follow his path from sexual madness to spiritual serenity, from bleeding maleness to an androgyny that fills the heart with light.”

While Millett and Jong seem to have touched on the essence of Miller’s achievement and his worth, his place in the pantheon of American writers has never been fixed, which might be a good thing, something Miller himself would have approved of.

Steve Von, a psychoanalyst who will be part of a panel discussion at this week’s festival in Brooklyn, put it this way in an e-mail: “Henry Miller is a strange character in modern literature: both more and less popular than he seems. At first ignored, then outlawed, then celebrated, then forgotten, then remembered. He seems universally known, almost old hat, and yet he still has not been accepted by the academy.”

Now we’re getting close. Once so scandalous that he was outlawed, Miller is now old hat. How much the world has changed – and what a big part he played in changing it, for better and for worse.

Henry Miller did me several huge favors. He taught me that a novel can be whatever a novelist has the courage and the talent to conjure. He taught me that there’s something noble about stepping off the American treadmill, a lesson that’s more valuable today than ever before. He taught me that my native distaste for governments, authority, religions, taboos, cops, saviors, and salesmen puts me in good company.

Was Miller a great writer? I don’t know and I don’t care. He wrote one great book, a few very fine ones, a fair number of mediocrities and some outright junk. Not at all a bad life’s work for any writer. In the end, strange to say, the work matters less to me than the man who wrote it – or, more precisely, what that man had to go through to get it written. There, to me, lies greatness.

Images courtesy the author.

The Holocaust is so massive a subject that it can easily overshadow everything else in an artist’s work. When Layton began to acknowledge it more openly in his writing, he soon found it difficult not to write about the holocaust. Massacres and dead animals began to crop up with frightening regularity in his work; the loud, intractable violence choked every other topic and made them seem banal in comparison.

The poster for the Art Spiegelman exhibit currently showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery, “CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps,” illustrates a related sentiment. The image is taken from a Spiegelman drawing from 1989 entitled “Self Portrait with Maus Mask.” In the foreground there’s the human Spiegelman with his usual shirt, vest, and cigarette, seated at his drawing table. An expressive mask of a mouse covers his face. His hands are pressed against his cheeks in a gesture of despair as he stares despondently at whatever he is trying to draw. In the background there hangs the covers of Maus I and an issue of RAW, the magazine thought up by Spiegelman’s wife Françoise Mouly, in which Maus was originally serialized. More ominously, a Nazi cat sharpshooter from the pages of Maus stands on a guard tower outside the window with stripes of barbed wire and a brick chimney belching black smoke.

In this image, we see the artist struggling to write and draw the subject he feels compelled to turn into art. We see Spiegelman dreading the inescapably difficult path he has set himself on.

The mouse mask echoes not only the mouse and cat metaphor Spiegelman uses illustrate Jews and Nazis in his book, but also the animal masks that characters wear when trying to pass off as members of groups there are not (so that Vladek Spiegelman is shown as a mouse wearing a pig’s mask when he is trying to pass as a non-Jewish Pole). By wearing the mask, Spiegelamn may also be showing us that he sees himself as a fraud when telling this story, because it isn’t really his to tell.

The self-portrait also represents Spiegelman’s very real struggle to finish writing Maus after the publication of the first volume in 1986, which garnered great acclaim. Spiegelman deals with this dilemma in the second chapter of Maus II, “Time Flies,” when he pulls a Cervantes and steps back from the narrative to address the reader and discuss the publication of the first volume. In the images, Spiegelman shrinks to the size of a child under the aggressive questions of journalists and businessmen who try to turn his book into a commercial product. The writer finally retreats to the home of his wise but eccentric shrink, who happens to keep framed photos of his dogs and cats.

Finally, “Self Portrait with Maus Mask” is an artistic manifestation of the struggle that was to come after the publication of Maus II in 1991, when Spiegelman found himself unable to take off his mouse mask and write a narrative about anything else. The black stain of the holocaust had spilled onto his drawing table.

2.
The Art Spiegelman exhibit, which collects decades of material from the artist’s personal collection, makes the artist’s struggle visible on the curated walls of a museum. One of the most enlightening aspects of the exhibit for me was its ability to portray Spiegelman’s chronology. There’s the explosive, variform comix of his youth, some of which was eventually collected in Breakdowns, in parallel with his hilarious work as art director of Topps, including the infamous Garbage Pail Kids, which gave him the income necessary to work on his personal projects. There’s the decade of scandalous New Yorker covers (not all of which were accepted) which followed Maus in the ’90s: a Hassidic Jew kissing a black woman, a presidential press conference with all microphones turned towards Clinton’s crotch, a haggard-looking concentration camp prisoner holding an Oscar to mark the success of Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful. And then came the recovery of Spiegelman’s voice as a narrative comic artist in the wake of 9/11 with In the Shadow of No Towers, his intensely political, satirical, personal account of the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath, printed as a board book to avoid the image-splicing seams of usual bindings.

The room devoted to Maus in the exhibit hushes visitors when they walk in. It is darker than the other rooms, and the walls are more cluttered: the finished pages of a few chapters are spread out horizontally at eye level and preliminary sketches extend above and below them. Historical documents, mementos, and source material are displayed in a handful of glass cases in the center of the room, while overhead the frank voice of Spiegelman’s father Vladek can be heard recounting his experience during World War II in one of the recordings which were the basis for the book.

The depth of Spiegelman’s talent and craft is immediately obvious from a glance at any page from Maus. He employs a dark, heavily striated style that replicates something drawn quickly, furiously. Yet the draft pages for Maus demonstrate that, in fact, Spiegelman slaved over each image to find just the right framing, the correct length of eyebrow to create the desired expression on his characters’ anthropomorphic faces. The highly energetic technique displayed in Maus only serves to make individual drawings more compelling — clear enough to be immediately recognizable, cramped enough to demand careful attention. At the same time, there is a fluidity in the drawings that helps each panel meld into the others and create a powerful impression that goes far beyond the punch of its constituent pieces.

I was also amazed, looking at the variety of pictures hanging in the other rooms of this exhibit, to discover the breadth of Spiegelman’s work. His drawing and narrative style is surprisingly flexible, adapting to the requirements of the story he is telling. He was once commissioned to design covers for the German editions of Boris Vian’s books. He drew lurid, sexy collage images with sharp lines and bold blocks of color, inspired by 1950s comics and cubism; he also took advantage of the book’s spine for mirroring effects between the front and back covers and the placement of elongated objects. In The Prisoner on the Hell Planet, Spiegelman uses stark contrasts and an expressionist style in both his text and drawings to express the deeply personal impact of his mother’s suicide.

In the exhibit, I also discovered with a great pleasure a short graphic piece Spiegelman made to commemorate the retirement of Charles Schulz. Spiegelman draws himself as a simplified mouse ruminating on the roof of a doghouse in honor of his subject’s work; even the font he uses for his characters’ speech is borrowed from Peanuts. “At its best, which was often,” Spiegelman writes, “the strip had the simplicity and depth charge of a haiku…only easier to understand.” In the next panel, Snoopy has appeared and is surprised to find another animal sitting on top of his doghouse. Spiegelman adds: “…and cuter.” Spiegelman’s work, in spite of the animals, is rarely cute — and yet here, to honor his subject, he too has made his own style as light and pleasant as a Peanuts strip.

It is through pieces like this that Spiegelman has continued to help nudge comics into rich new territory. After showing that it was possible to write a graphic memoir that couldn’t work in any other form (unless as a kind of doomed hybrid between Elie Wiesel’s Night and Brian Jacques’s Redwall), he began to experiment with essays in graphic form, like the piece on childhood he made for the McSweeney’s special “San Francisco Panorama” issue. On display at the exhibit is the original of another non-fiction piece on the same subject called “In the Dump,” co-written and drawn with Maurice Sendak for in the The New Yorker in 1993. In the piece, Spiegelman goes to visit the reclusive Sendak to discuss the realities of childhood and the nature of imagination. This piece is also impressive because it’s a full-on collaboration: Sendak and Spiegelman worked on the panels at the same time, each drawing himself and then working together on the background.

Born from universal ideas, crafted by the hands of artists, written with passion, the comic strip has become the medium for narratives that can be read again and again and images that can be stared at pensively in the hushed space of a museum.

3.
Discussing his famous graphic novel V for Vendetta, Alan Moore once stated that he always preferred the original, serialized version of the book because it wasn’t in color. “The images were entirely in black and white,” he explains, “but the whole story, in moral terms, had only shades of grey.”

Something similar occurs in Maus, where the drawings often fall into a thick chiaroscuro and hard hatching turns page space into almost solid black. Arguably, no other story has been made to express absolute black and absolute white as clearly as World War II. So how can an artist integrate the textures of grey that make a story truly poignant?

Spiegelman allows his book to transcend its own purpose as a holocaust survival tale by crafting it as a metafiction. This was something I did not expect before I began to learn more about Maus and its writer. At first, I thought the book was just (although that’s not quite the right word) a story about holocaust survivors in which the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. But that story is only the core around which the other elements gravitate.

Maus is also very much about a son trying to come to terms with his father — it is an exploration of their relationship, in which the father’s story creates a bridge between them, a reason for them to get together and talk. Spiegelman was very clever in framing his father’s story in the war years with material from the present day: visiting his father, giving us a portrait of his life in old age, mulling over ethical questions, asking his father about specific details. The back and forth between past and present makes the story he tells all the more real.

But there’s still more. On a foundational level, Maus, like every work of literature that admits to being one, is a book about the process of writing a book. It explores not only the meaning of surviving the holocaust and managing a difficult father, but also the difficulties of drawing and writing about this father and telling his story. The fact that the reader is privy to Spiegelman’s questions, comments, and process within Maus, especially in the second volume, is essential to the book’s agenda.

4.
One of Spiegelman’s most admirable qualities, expressed by both the man and his art, is an honest form of moral rectitude. He experienced the success of Maus with considerable discomfort, a discomfort he folded into the book itself: Is this his story to tell? Is he disrespecting the memory of the millions of people who died in the concentration camps by telling it? To this day, Spiegelman believes one of his greatest achievements is to have resisted attempts to make a film version of the book.

I believe his peculiar strength lies in his resolve not to go down the path of artists like Layton who, once they started, were unable to leave behind the subject of the holocaust. Spiegelman refuses to become a figure of authority on the holocaust, another Elie Wiesel. (The closest he has come, admittedly, is in his Life is Beautiful cover for The New Yorker.) Despite his struggle to find another narrative thrust for his graphic art after Maus, his decade of so-called silence was in fact one of his richest — most of his truly arresting shorter work and many pieces I used in this essay to illustrate his genius, were produced in this period. Besides, as Françoise Mouly has said, a decade is not really so long to find your voice again as a storyteller. And Spiegelman has proven that he has many more stories to tell.

“CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps” is open at the Vancouver Art Gallery until June 9, 2013. It was originally shown at Angoulême and Paris, France, and then at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. It will move to the Jewish Museum in New York later this year.

Marvel’s readers had an intimate relationship with this universe’s architects, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and the rest of the Marvel “Bullpen.” You could always feel the hand of Kirby in his funky Skrull soldiers or in the geometric oddities he placed in outer space. You could sense Ditko’s hand in Peter Parker’s slouch or Spider-Man’s wiry frame. Stan Lee, knowing full well that stories are more interesting if you think you know the storyteller, capitalized on this quality. In his monthly column, he cultivated his image as the guy at Thanksgiving who could move comfortably between the kids’ and adults’ tables, telling the same bad jokes to everyone. Though vaguely liberal he avoided political debate. He could be wry. When in the tenth issue of The Fantastic Four Dr. Doom returns to Manhattan to face off against his arch-nemeses, he first stops by Marvel’s offices to menace Lee and Kirby. This is all another way of saying that Stan Lee made sure you knew as much about himself and his colleagues as he needed you to know, and no more than that.

In real life, in our universe, the mythmakers did not always maintain the good humor that pervaded their comics. As Sean Howe writes in his engrossing work of reportage, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, they “carted their own proprietary feelings about the characters and stories, and their own emotional and financial entanglements, which made passing through the company’s constantly revolving doors an arduous and sometimes painful process.” Howe’s book covers the entire history of Marvel, from 1939 to Disney’s acquisition of the company 70 years later. It’s an entertaining book, filled with some primo gossip, and unlike previous histories of Marvel, completely unauthorized. The book has few heroes and villains, only figures who, with varying degrees of success and failure, negotiate the politics of a large enterprise for their own wants and needs. It’s a portrait of what capitalism can create and what it can’t create — and what it can destroy.

2.
This is the golden age for histories of the comic-book medium, whether they be smart journalism or pop-culture anthropology. David Hadju’s The Ten Cent Plague recounted the industry’s fight against censorship in the 1950s. Craig Yoe’s Secret Identity collected the erotica Superman co-creator Joe Shuster produced for the underground pornography industry after he was exiled from DC Comics. These books are titillating. We all know that comics are not just for kids, but they still appeal to how we remember our first tremor of sexual excitement during our pre-pubescence. There was always something forbidden in between the panels of comics. Hadju, Yoe, and now Howe’s accounts remind us of what we already knew, that the guy who wrote, drew, or edited your favorite stories was capable of saying “fuck.”

Marvel’s comics, like those of most of the industry, were never wholesome. In 1939, Martin Goodman, who ran with his brothers a publishing enterprise called Timely released Marvel Comics #1, an 80-page compendium of stories modeled on DC’s Action Comics. It featured Carl Burgos’s Human Torch and, more notably, Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner, the prince of a lost city of Atlantis, a classical figure with exotic eyes who hated every lesser mortal who crossed his path. The issue sold 800,000 copies and Goodman ordered his workers to develop more superheroes. In March 1941, on the cover of Captain America #1, a hero wrapped in the American flag punched out Adolf Hitler. The children and teenagers of the ’30s and ’40s had their own Mortal Kombat fantasies and Marvel Comics realized them with exquisite detail.

There was almost never a time in the company’s history when its talent felt properly compensated for their work. Captain America was the child of Jack Kirby and the writer Joe Simon. After they were cut out of the profits the new hero was earning the company, they began moonlighting for DC, Timely’s chief competitor. When they were promptly fired for treason, Kirby was convinced Stan Lee, Goodman’s wife’s cousin, a teenager who had pushed his way into Timely to work as an office boy, proofreader, and then part-time writer, had ratted them out. Whether it was true or not, Lee was a canny little guy and Goodman gave him a big promotion. By great good luck an 18-year-old had achieved the fantasy of every 10-year-old. Lee was the editor of a comic book company. The story is repeated throughout Howe’s history. Lee, a talented man but no prodigy, is management’s favorite son. Kirby, a master of his craft, is the less loved older brother.

After Lee got back from military service in 1945, the company began a long decline. Kirby and Simon spent these years making war, horror, western, and romance comics for various publishers. The two split in the mid-’50s, and a few years later in 1958 Lee, well aware of Kirby’s reputation in the industry as a hit-maker, offered him some work. Their relationship was always more of a partnership born of necessity than a friendship.

And then in 1961, Lee and Kirby produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four. The cover, Howe writes, “was nothing like the other superhero titles on the rack. There were no colorful costumes; the protagonists appeared small and helpless; a white background lent the whole scenario an unfinished look.” There’s no way to know when a new genre is created. It gets reformed and reworked based on past conventions.  Howe notes that the first issue of Fantastic Four, while it did not resemble any superhero comics, did resemble the horror comics Lee produced with Kirby and Steve Ditko. A fear of the uncanny and of what it can do to the human body would inform a new line of heroes, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. These heroes were as self-loathing as they were self-confident and it’s tempting to imagine these artists hunched over their boards informing their heroes with their own bitterness and insecurities.

By the end of 1962, Timely’s comics division was renamed Marvel.

3.
In the ’50s, Lee had developed a system to streamline the production of Timely’s comics, which came to be known as the Marvel Method. The late Les Daniels described it in his 1991 book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics. A writer would provide the barest of outlines for a plot. The artist would sketch the panels, developing the story’s flow through basic composition. The writer would then insert dialogue. “Born of expediency as much as inspiration it enabled artists to achieve their full potential by emphasizing the visual elements that are at the heart of the medium’s appeal,” Daniels writes. The method encouraged the artist to think in narrative and the writer to think in pictures. Daniels quoted Lee accordingly, “I’d look at Jack [Kirby]’s pictures and the words just came into my mind because the expressions and poses of the characters were so dramatic. I would tailor the writing to the art.” Many artists just couldn’t handle the Marvel Method, according to Lee, and had to leave the company.

Howe writes that the method offered an “effective conduit for creative synergy,” but offers a different perspective on the artists’ issues. Wally Wood, the famed EC Comics horror artist who came to work at Marvel, complained that the method forced him to work above his pay grade, as both artist and writer. On the surface the method looked like a means of fostering intimate collaborations, but the paper-pushing in the office made it strikingly easy, particularly in the case of Ditko and Lee, for the artist and writer not to talk to one another. Ditko considered himself under-compensated and thanks to the Marvel Method he snuck his own words into an issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Peter Parker, in Ditko’s hands, demanded of his editor J. Jonah Jameson “equal value trade,” a term lifted from Ayn Rand.

Kirby was more responsible than anyone for building the Marvel Universe, but he needed to collaborate with Lee or really any other writer, even via this impersonal system, to do his best work. He left the company in 1970, when it became obvious he would never get the money he deserved. He went solo at DC where he proved, as usual, a grand artist, but also an incompetent writer, incapable of even the most basic syntax. Until his death, he found himself struggling to extract some royalties from his work. He eventually earned an unsatisfying settlement and in interviews he grew increasingly shrill, claiming towards the end of his life that he was solely responsible for Marvel’s pantheon. Everything Marvel did was legal, but it’s hard to disagree too much with James Sturm, who complained in Slate last year of the company’s treatment of Kirby.  “What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel’s media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right.”

Howe spends about 100 of his approximately 450 pages on this most crucial period of Marvel’s history. The rest of the book follows a similar pattern, of writers and artists who demand their rights while growing frustrated with the company’s method of production and publishers and editors who condescend to their talent. Lee runs off to California to try to adapt his comics to film, while serving as the company’s mascot in the press. When he visits comic-book conventions it becomes embarrassingly clear that he doesn’t bother following the current Marvel storylines. Goodman sells off his company in 1968, making a tidy profit, of which the creators of his heroes do not partake. A series of mergers follows. Talent comes and goes. The editors manage the ever-complex Marvel Universe while mediating between the publisher and creators. And despite the corporate machinery, eccentrics still manage to endow their work with their own idiosyncrasies. Chris Claremont’s X-Men run is marked by a fascination with cross-dressing and bondage. Steve Gerber sneaks pro-acid propaganda into a Captain Marvel story. They all leave the company eventually, looking for and sometimes finding better things.

Every pop culture institution, if it lasts long enough, indulges in some form of self-reflection. Office politics had long seeped into the storylines of Marvel Comics. But the most blatant depiction in Marvel of an artist at war with his publisher I know of appears in an issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man from the early 2000s. Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin, maintains a criminal empire from his perch in Manhattan. He’s an enormous man, quiet, methodical, and brutal, capable of crushing the head of a subordinate with his bare hands. Fisk has discovered a non-violent way to injure our hero. Once he lures Spider-Man to his office, he shoves a Spider-Man doll in his face. Fisk has bought all rights to the young superhero’s image. “I own you,” he tells him.

By the time Bendis wrote that comic, avid Marvel fans were well aware of the company’s copyright issues which had delayed the production of film adaptations, and which had alienated its most famous artists, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. It may seem impressive that Marvel’s suits would allow Bendis’s story to be published, but it really isn’t all that brave a move. The story almost defuses the rage one feels for the company’s treatment of its talent. Most of us, despite our judgment, learn to accept corporate greed as a force that can never be fully eradicated, and some of us grow to celebrate it for perverse reasons. This is the power of irony in our corporate age. The Kingpin has charisma. He makes you almost admire the kind of bastard who would deny a worker his paycheck. In between the panels you can hear Peter Parker tell Wilson Fisk to go fuck himself.

4.
For most of its history, Marvel Comics, practicing good business sense, tried not to alienate its readers for political reasons. In the ’60s, Captain America, who had killed thousands of long-toothed Japs in World War II, did not travel to Vietnam. Peter Parker avoided joining the Columbia University-like protests that raged at his own school. More than a decade into the AIDS epidemic, the company flinched but finally relented when one of its writers wanted a minor superhero to come out, though they balked at permitting a superhero with HIV. Like half the Democratic Party, the company would come to embrace the gay-rights movement only when it seemed absolutely safe to do so. There’s an anecdote that Howe tells early in his history that we just want to be true. About a year before Captain America punched out Hitler in 1941, one of Timely’s forgotten heroes punched out a dictator named Hiller. Why not Hitler? “Goodman, it was said, was afraid Adolf might sue.”

These political restrictions, despite their amorality, strengthened the comics. Gay readers didn’t have an out hero in the Marvel Universe until the ’90s, but they also knew that every one of the X-Men, teenage outcasts who run off to a special school where they wear tight clothes and kick ass, had a lot in common with themselves. Captain America never talked about Vietnam, but readers could imagine the pathos he could not voice when he thought about the atrocities committed in the name of the flag he wore. Save for Ditko’s weird interjections, Peter Parker’s failure to take a strong political stand only cemented his loner status. Strong myths are democratic. They allow enough space for the reader to do his own writing.

The newer comics are more ballsy. Mark Millar’s take on the Avengers and X-Men, in particular, depicted a post-9/11 dystopia. Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth: Red, White and Black riffed on the story of the Tuskegee airmen and inserted the history of eugenics into Captain America’s origin story. The recent film adaptations, which must appeal to an enormous audience, are more careful. The premise of Iron Man – a reckless weapons manufacturer whose enemies either employ or are inspired by the technology he creates – could have made Jon Favreau and Shane Black’s movies more cynical. The first hour of Joe Johnston’s Captain America was a nostalgic blast, even if its depiction of World War II-America was lily-white. The gay-rights drama in Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies are a happy exception. Still the Marvel movies are at their best when they overcome the confines of their political moment. When Ian Mckellen’s Magneto breaks out of his plastic prison, he exudes a royal contempt for humanity. When Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man submits himself to the bosom of New York subway riders, he surrenders to his fellow man. Again, the openness of these myths allows us to identify with both hero and villain, to examine the divisions within our own selves. At these moments, the stories are Shakespearean.

Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man brought to the screen a quality that was always apparent in the comics, but which was absent in Raimi’s trilogy. Andrew Garfield’s walk, which combined a teenager’s slouch with a spider’s athleticism, created an inseparable connection between Peter Parker and his alter ego. As the teenager becomes a superhero, he becomes a craftsman, whose artistry is embedded within his body. Peter Parker/Spider-Man is physically impressive, but also an urban creature possessed of a fundamental goodness. His body merges with and improves the New York sky-scape. The cliché about Spider-Man, that he is the superhero who could be you, is wrong. Peter Parker represents what you are at your best moments, which is another way of saying that he is better than you. You can never be him, but you can identify a small part of yourself in him. The movie’s villain, Rhys Ifans’s Curt Connors is impossible to hate. He is a victim himself of a faceless corporation and he emerges from the sewers of New York, an ugly creature made of pure brawn and id. A little bit of both men lives within each of us.

This $230 million dollar product exists because Sony wanted to keep its rights to Spider-Man from reverting back to Disney/Marvel. And yet it still has something approximating a soul. In a more just world Kirby and Ditko would have been given their proper compensations long ago, and then released their characters into the public domain. It’s not fair that any corporate entity should own such a myth. No one deserves to own anyone else’s fantasy, no matter how well they tend to it.

5.
One final note.

Howe returns again and again in his book to the very existence of the Marvel Universe itself, a vast web of stories and characters made up of a million crossovers. Early on, Marvel’s innovators realized that if readers felt they had to buy different titles to get a complete story, they would. That strategy reached its apex with the 50-issue Secret Wars series in the mid-’80s, a vehicle for a toy line. Many of us grew up loving this universe, with its own internal logic and physical properties, even if it grew too enormous for anyone to understand, and the editors, despite their best efforts, failed to maintain continuity. This is what capitalism can create. Thanks to bitter rivalries, smart decisions, and corporate mismanagement, the Marvel Universe has become a universe very much like our own: interminable and tedious, filled with plot holes and unexplained phenomena, and at rare moments, a crudely-drawn beauty.

1.
I went back to Ohio Friday night to see another friend from college get married. This was my fifth such wedding in three years. Surrounded by my Ohio friends and their spouses, I found myself having to consider, once again, what it means to be 29 and not in a meaningful relationship. My last long-term romance concluded in the wake of my graduation from Ohio University in 2006. I immediately migrated to the creative mecca of New York, a city that doesn’t pressure you to grow up in the same way the Midwest does. Professionally and creatively-speaking, it is a world class incubator, no doubt. But if you wish to remain a career bachelor, you receive a Big Apple cosign into your seventies. Every transplant I know has had to head home at some point to face the germinating evidence of their profound singleness.

I was in Ohio less than 24 hours, as I had to return to perform a poetry set on Sunday afternoon at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park. I am a working poet. Over the past six years, I have led creative writing workshops and performed poetry in auditoriums, bars, syringe exchanges, universities, libraries, prisons, youth centers, bookstores, and theaters in Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and across the United States. The pay is modest but manageable, and every time I seriously consider a less freelance source of income, some new window of opportunity opens whispering, don’t be afraid, you are supposed to be here.

When asked to explain my choices, I’ve said, “Art is how you explain what it feels like to be alive in the 21st century. I am an emotional historian.” But that’s really my answer to, “Why should we all make art?” My why is more personal. When I hit a writing groove, or perform, all these divided parts focus into one story. In these small moments, I am not confused about what matters.

Looking out at the crowd in Tompkins Square Park, I realize that this is the largest audience I have ever performed for. Over 6,000 people spread across the grass and concrete to see jazz. I go to the bathroom five times in 45 minutes, and nearly throw up in front of the Summer Stage photo backdrop. Jeanne Kabenji once told me that, “Stage fright is your body informing you of a journey into the unknown.” I wish I had asked anyone I love to be here.

2.
Yesterday, my mother drove two hours from Cincinnati to take me to breakfast. While my hungover stomach caved in around itself in the Columbus Red Roof Inn, I prayed to the gods of clarity to make me a good son. I’ve spent too many years taking out my own emotional confusion on my mother because she never stops loving me. She would rather be with me than without me, even when I’m a dick, and I’ve spent years fashioning that into some sort of license.

I make it through a breakfast burrito, and keep the narratives about last night’s reception minimalist. We have two hours until she drives me to the airport, so we go to Goodale Park.

My mother is the kindest person a lot of people know. I often tell her this, and she consistently assures, “You haven’t always known me.”

She was the seventh of twelve children in an Irish-Catholic, anti-contraception household in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. In 1995, my grandmother was losing a battle with cancer, while single-handedly caring for my grandfather whose brain was succumbing more, each day, to Alzheimer’s. She allowed my mother to visit and stay until she passed; to change my grandfather’s diapers, take him on walks; to bring my grandmother water, and make her bed. My mother has a history of never asking more from those who are suffering, and she listens to people (not just loved ones) in a way that makes them feel heard. That scene in White Men Can’t Jump where Rosie Perez explains love to Woody Harrelson, something like, “I don’t want you to bring me water, I want you to sympathize. To say Gloria, I too know what it’s like to be thirsty.” My mother invented that shit, but she also brings water.

This spawned years of rebellion from me, her youngest son. I pursued independence by repeatedly rejecting, resenting, desperately succumbing to, and then ultimately depending on this profound well of empathy. By “repeatedly,” I mean over, and over, and over between the ages of 13 and 28. This didn’t prevent me from appreciating my mother, but it did prevent me from humanizing her kindness.

After my parents’ brief separation when I was 14, my body would not let my mother cry around me. I would, literally, fall asleep. My father, with a heavy heart, had left the home of his wife and four children in order to find out more about the love he had for another woman. It was impossible for my mother to talk about what was happening without crying, and my reaction was always swift. Eventually, she stopped telling me. For 14 years, we focused on a subject we both loved: Me.

This Saturday in Columbus is the longest time I’ve spent alone with my mother since I was a teenager. The overt parts of who I am, I immediately trace to my father. I was a chubby kid (as was my dad), and my three older brothers were not, which made everyone assume I was the primary recipient of his genetics. We are both viscerally stubborn, until quietly we are not. We don’t allow the ones we love to know we have heard them. We lash out defensively, then, over time, we let them watch us change.

3.
My time slot at the Jazz Festival is just before the headliner: Gregory Porter is a legend, and the park quakes for him. The ten minutes it takes his band to set up is to be filled with poetry. The festival host from Jazz 88.3 says only, “Now welcome the author of The New Clean, Jon Sands.” Followed by 6,000 people who do not know I can see each of their faces, individually. I begin a poem called “When I See Andre 3000 Buying Bananas at Trader Joe’s.” The first line is, I say everything you’ve ever done/ has meant so much to me./ He says, I’ve done PCP. I say/ that meant so much to me. 

When I get to the part of the poem where Andre 3000 asks me about everything I’ve ever done, I have to admit, I masturbated this morning picturing/ a woman I made out with two years ago./ I am preachy and self-important/ when I talk about race with my family,/ sometimes when I’m not listening,/ I make my face look like it’s SUPER listening.

The crowd communicates two types of people: those who have no idea what is happening on stage at this jazz festival, and are entertained by that, and those who have no idea what is happening, and are decidedly not. I’m not sure which camp I fall in.

The poem ends to a confused smattering of applause, and I say, “The other poem I’d like to read you today is a love poem.” This is the first time I have ever been booed. It was only about 100 of 6,000, but 100 sounds like a shitload.

I say, “I know! I can’t wait to hear Gregory Porter either, but he needs to set up!” Then I introduce the poem I wrote for the wedding of my brother Ben in October of 2011 on the occasion of his marriage to a Texas transplant named Wendell. They had been engaged before same-sex marriage was legal in New York, and whenever fielding questions of whether they planned to go to Massachusetts to legitimize their nuptials, they’d reply that they wanted to get married in the city where they had fallen in love, where they go to work, pay taxes, argue, take walks, and drink coffee. If the civil rights didn’t exist yet— they would vote, and they would wait.

The first time I read the poem aloud was to my brother, sunk into his couch in Hell’s Kitchen. It documents the night Ben first knew he loved Wendell, four months into their relationship. Wendell leapt from the bed they shared, mid-credits of a James Bond movie, to execute an interpretive spy dance around Ben’s bedroom in his underwear. This man, possessed only by the desire to bring him joy, unlocked Ben. The poem says of my brother, You are traveling into your past where he is/ not, but now you see him everywhere./ In the moving van at nine years old. At thirteen,/ in the mirror and the bottle of pills, he was there./ In the arms of the first man to hold you/ and assure you were beautiful. 

In my high school of 2,200 kids, Ben was the only student out-of-the-closet. He came out the summer before his junior year, but four years prior, after being bullied at choir practice by an eighth grader who called him a faggot (something that had happened to him since he was in second grade), he quietly admitted to himself that everyone was right. He was shameful, and it would be best for our family if he wasn’t here. He walked into our bathroom and swallowed a bottle of Advil. A half hour later he told my mother, and in three minutes he was riding shotgun in my father’s Ford Taurus doing 55 on the back roads to the hospital. The doctors induced vomiting, and he spent the next four hours in a hospital bed while my mother brushed the hair across his forehead and whispered over and over again that she loved him.

I read the poem I wrote for his wedding to this man who I need to never lose faith in me: my brother, who has played an unimaginable role in the person I am attempting to become. The poem had to claw from my mouth as we held each other sobbing on the couch.

The reading in Tompkins Square Park is less cathartic. I can see the individual faces, the ones that have no idea that I’m looking at them. Some are angry that I am still on stage. A few have tears in their eyes. Some are confused. Some not. As though nudged from a dream, my set is over, and I am free to consider what just happened. The stage manager says, “Tough crowd, huh?” I am 29 and single, walking backstage to mild applause.

4.
My mother’s younger sister Mary died at four years old. She drowned in a lake behind their house. My mom is 60 now, sitting with me in Goodale Park. She tells me that years after her death, the man who found Mary’s body would die as a drunk driver in a car accident. He had carried the body back to their house. Each brother and sister saw her laid out at 4:00 p.m. on the only free bed. A neighbor cooked them all hot dogs and heated up frozen corn, and by 5:00 p.m. all the younger children were put to bed. In the morning, they woke for the wake, and by 2:00 p.m. Mary was buried forever in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

She tells me that when the family got home from the funeral, her two eldest siblings, both in high school, were scheduled to attend a weekly sock-hop. My grandparents urged them to go, saying, “You have to move on with your life.” For years, her parents rarely spoke of Mary. My mother would learn in her adult life that they had spent three years of nights privately crying in the dark.

My mom was seven, learning that grief did not involve sadness. You die, then a hole closes around where you were, perhaps leaving a small scar, and then the survivors continue with the business of mortality. Her parents fought, perhaps, the most difficult battle of their lives in silence in order to not burden their children with even a small share of grief.

“Did you think that was a good thing?” I ask.

“Honestly, as a child, I never thought about that.”

It wasn’t until over a decade later, when my mother was at Creighton University in Omaha, that she slid into a profound depression. Her realization, thousands of miles from her gigantic family and past, was that if she died, it would be a small story on the Creighton Campus, a small story in New Jersey, and ultimately, no one depended on her survival.

Then she tells me, her youngest son, what I never thought to ask. “I really tried hard to be the best person I could be. So that if I died it mattered.”

She puts a hand on my forearm, and her face scrunches together like it might withhold what she just said. Tears begin to drop from her cheek and gather on the wood. I can see all that I have inherited in this life from work my mother did before she ever knew me; what it means that I am sitting across from her in an empty park watching her cry. I picture my mother again at the hospital with Ben in 1994. I can see how she must have wanted nothing more than to protect him at choir practice, to defend him in study hall, or anywhere else that adolescence proved itself relentless to her 13-year-old son; how all she had to give was the person she had become, how it placed her by his hospital bed: a steadfast witness, a position she would never abandon; how then when he came out of the closet four years later, she knew that he had saved his own life.

I can see how much it meant to me to be asked to document the love story of my older brother; to be held, weeping on his couch, in recognition of the life we’ve spent together. Since I was born, I have always assumed I was becoming only my father. I can see how the desire to matter is not a charge that began with my birth, or will culminate with my death. My eyes are open, and I can see, for a moment, who I have become.

On June 25, 1903, in the tiny town of Motihari amid the torrid heat of the Indian plains, Ida Mabel Blair delivered her second child, a son. Her husband Richard was an Assistant Sub-Deputy Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj. The opium trade between British India and China had been legalized since 1860 (although opium was still illegal in India) and the government had a whole department to attend to cultivating and exporting it. The Blairs named their newborn Eric. Eric Blair would go on to become one of the greatest writers of the century, an acknowledged master of prose who would be known in all corners of the globe, not by his given name but by his pen name: George Orwell.

Richard Blair’s position in the government was not high, and their house, an unadorned single-storey colonial bungalow, reflected this. Motihari those days was an outpost that was slap-bang-wallop in the wilderness. The local people struggled to eke a living making mats, rugs, cooking oil, and string bags. Social life for an English couple was virtually non-existent if they had to keep apart from the locals, as the British almost always did. The two-roomed brick house, with whitewashed walls and a tiled roof, housed Richard and Ida, their children Marjorie and Eric, and an ayah, or servant. In a photograph taken in the house, Eric is in his mother’s arms, a chubby baby dressed in a gown with a lace collar. He is near-bald with a lick of wavy hair brushed back from above the forehead, and is trying to timidly turn away from the camera. In another photo, he is held by an ayah. You could never tell this baby would turn into the tall and lanky George Orwell with his clump of stiff, black hair.

Officials in Bihar (the Indian state that is home to Motihari) now harbor designs to develop a park dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi that would entail demolishing this building. Bihar’s urban development minister took everybody by surprise by laying the foundation stone of the park on April 13.

As it is, Orwell’s birth home has languished in dilapidation for decades. Damaged by an earthquake in 1934, it deteriorated into a derelict building that stray animals sheltered in at night or during inclement weather. The homeless also used it; it became a place for people to gather to drink and gamble. A statue of Orwell on the premises was vandalized. After sustained efforts by campaigners, the government announced four years ago that it would restore the dwelling. But nothing was done. The house continues to be scorched by the sun, drenched by the rain, and battered by the wind. Part of the roof has caved in and a grapefruit tree has weakened the southern wall. For decades, one could pass by the house and never know that Orwell was born here until Debapriya Mukherjee, head of the local Orwell Commemorative Committee, got the Rotary Club to put up a board indicating that fact in Hindi and English. A small bust of Orwell with a plaque was also installed. Now thanks to fresh protests by Mukherjee and his dedicated group, District Magistrate Vinay Kumar directed the officials to place the plan for the Gandhi Park on hold. So Orwell’s birth house has been saved — at least for now.

Orwell lived in this house for the first year of his life and was then taken to Oxfordshire, England, by his mother, while his father continued in government service. This was not unusual; Kipling, Thackeray, and Lawrence Durrell were all born in India and, at various ages, went to England for their education, and Orwell’s sister Marjorie was already six. In 1905, when Eric was 18 months, he was misdiagnosed with bronchitis by a local Oxfordshire doctor. It was, in fact, tuberculosis, an ailment that relentlessly clung to him until it finally killed him at age 46. Whether he contracted it in Motihari or in England is not known, but the switch from sultry India to damp England certainly would not have helped.

After his family had departed for England, Orwell’s father was transferred to Burma, and the house in Motihari became a storage facility for opium, which had by now become the region’s main cash crop. The Blairs never returned to the house.

Orwell eventually opted to join the Indian Civil Service. After all, he had been born in India and his father had served the Raj. He had been brought up to believe that the British rule of India and other colonies was moral and right. He was posted to Burma; his time in that country not only opened his eyes to what imperialism really entailed, they also irrevocably shaped him as a writer. Eric Blair began turning into George Orwell.

The panjandrums who want to establish the Gandhi memorial park know a lot about Gandhi. But how much do they know of the man they have belittled by neglecting his birth home for decades, the home they now might do away with altogether? How do they view Orwell? Do they just see him as a white man who, as an infant, crawled on the floor of this house before leaving for some other place, where he then wrote a few books, and all of this over half a century ago?

Surely it must be a matter of pride that such a writer was born in one’s own little corner of this vast planet? Surely it would be more than worth it to take the little effort required to keep his birth home in a respectable shape, nay, convert it into a well-maintained heritage site? Indeed, there are many in Motihari who heartily endorse such sentiments. The local government obviously thinks differently and seems blind to the tourism potential here with the accompanying boost to the local economy.

“That seems to be a fixed rule in London: whenever you do by some chance have a decent vista, block it up with the ugliest statue you can find,” wrote Orwell. But those erecting the statue he was referring to probably did not consider it ugly nor did they realize (let alone have any qualms) that they were diminishing something of beauty that already existed at that site. Likewise, the local government in Motihari may have little idea of the extent of what the demolition of Orwell’s birth house entails, although the protestations have given it pause.

Gandhi had no connection with this house, so why is he in the picture? In the early 20th century, the British forced the farmers in this district to stop growing food crops and to instead grow indigo, which they bought at throwaway prices. When famine struck, the impoverished farmers had no food; instead of providing it, the British raised taxes. Gandhi visited the district in 1917 to start a mass protest movement. The government wants to commemorate this, but such a memorial could technically be located anywhere in the district. Motihari was chosen as it was the biggest town and there was open land adjoining Orwell’s house. Gandhi’s name has a strong emotive pull and having announced that there will be a Gandhi memorial park, the government cannot drop the plan without losing face. But it can certainly choose another location or at least let the boundary of the park stop short of Orwell’s house.

Today, India seeks an increasingly larger role on the world stage. Its economic clout propels it, but as any successful diplomat can tell you, to win friends and influence people it helps enormously if you are liked. Preserving an edifice on your territory that means something to literary enthusiasts in all nooks of the globe has its endearing side. But if Motihari’s authorities manage to slither around the current judicial restraining order and Orwell’s house falls, with every brick that is ground into the dust, many people the world over will like India a little less.

I am one young writer who has been influenced by Salter’s work, but I do find that there is a cultishness to Salter fandom: either your eyes go wide and your heart goes pitter-patter, or you don’t really get the hype. A Sport and a Pastime is the book that the uninitiated are encouraged to read in order to encounter the full potency of Salterism, and it’s not a book about which one can feel lukewarm. The provocative sex scenes between Phillip Dean and Anne-Marie are too straightforward and anatomical to be read as arty erotica, too emotionally serious and lyrical to be dismissed (or enjoyed) as cheap pornography. That the nameless narrator claims repeatedly throughout the novel, “I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him out of my own inadequacies” has the effect of making Dean and Anne-Marie’s every word and act feel even more sensually alive, enlarged, insistent:

In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is the worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, advancing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy.

When reading a Salter story or novel, you’re either all in, or else a battle will ensue in which you resist the text’s inherent demand for surrender — of your analytical cleverness and ironic distance, your progressive social politics, your graduate-school-honed fidelity to the underwhelming epiphany.

A feast of love is beginning…They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

This is not George Saunders or Lorrie Moore making fun of the ineffectualness of romantic impulses; this is for real.

Feasts, domains, and a happiness so-good-that-it’s-bad are the stuff of greatness, of heroes. In his recent profile for The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote that Salter’s having “fixated on heroism” has contributed to “grounds for a slender reputation.” This supposed “fixation,” which I would characterize in more positive terms — an interest, a belief, a vision — is at the heart of what draws me to Salter’s work, and perhaps, yes, herein is where the road divides: if fumbling, self-undermining antiheroes are your thing, Salter may not be. “I believe there’s a right way to live and to die. The people who can do that are interesting to me,” he said in a 1993 interview. The nameless narrator of Sport, Vernon Rand of Solo Faces, Viri Berland of Light Years, and the many solitary, teeming souls of his short stories may not be heroes or heroines per se, but they are deeply in pursuit of a “right way” — which is a life of greatness and goodness, feeling and fortitude, lust and love. In Salter’s universe, pleasure-seeking is a kind of courage; sexual ecstasy aligned with holiness. A man’s search for pride, honor, triumph, are not separate from, nor opposed to, the sensual, the bodily; rather, these are — must be — of a piece, in a life fully lived. From Solo Faces:

[Rand’s] image cleansed the air like rain. He was the envoy of a breed one had forgotten, generous, unafraid, with a saintly smile and the vascular system of a marathon runner.

And later, we get this narrative declaration, typical of Salter’s omniscient authorial voice: “The act of love…is still the most serious act of all.”

2.
Age comes up frequently in reference to All That Is. Presumably it is Salter’s final major work, which is both a delicate and unavoidable subtext to any consideration of it.

The novel’s epigraph — “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real” — is a quote by… James Salter. To my mind, it announces to the reader that the author has reached that stage of life that warrants staking out his own ideas and insights, deference and deflection be damned. When you’ve lived as long and fully as Jim Salter has, it is perhaps as good a time as any to be forthrightly self-referential. Of course the quotation is printed without attribution — four lines in a sea of white space. So too, the protagonist Phillip Bowman is an unexplicit incarnation of Salter — a young man returning from war and going on to find his way in life, letters, and love.

The “factual” alignments are both skeletal and notable: both men born in 1925, in Manhattan, raised as the only child of a doting mother in New Jersey; both serving in the military and recognizing the experience as the most important of their lives, “the pride he would never lose.”  Bowman’s early marriage is to a girl named Vivian Amussen from a Virginia horse-country family, like Salter’s first wife Ann; the fictional marriage ends as the real-life one did, in divorce.  Vivian thinks of herself as daring, “taking the train up to see a man she had met in a bar, whose background she did not know but who seemed to have depth and originality.” It does not feel like an effort to hear a youthful Salter thinking of himself in this way, through Vivian’s, or Ann’s, eyes. Of course there are divergences: Bowman is an editor, not a writer. He fought in Okinawa in the Navy, Salter in Korea as an Air Force pilot. Bowman goes to Harvard, Salter graduated West Point. Bowman and Vivian divorce before there are any children, Jim and Ann Salter had four children, one of whom died tragically as a young adult.

Still, “facts” aside, All That Is strikes me as the most autobiographical of Salter’s work to date, which is to say the author is more present in these pages than he’s ever been. His final novel reads like his own particular bird’s-eye of the reality he believes in, cherishes, proffers to readers as worthy of transcription from “dream” to immortality — the criteria for which may be rather straightforward: “All you have in life is what you remember,” he said once, his paraphrase of the Renoir quote he used as the epigraph for Light Years. I read All That Is as a kind of impressionistic record of Salter’s memory — the people, places, emotions, perceptions, and anecdotes that have stuck, and have thus mattered. Bowman’s story, for example, begins at age 20, returns in flashback to memories of childhood (his mother primarily), and ends as he approaches 60; these, presumably, are the years in a man’s life that most matter. “What has your life been like?” asks “an older woman with a marvelous face like a prune” whom Bowman meets at a dinner in England. “What are the things that have mattered?” He is 45 years old and goes on to say something about the war, but

He was not sure he had told the truth. His mind had just drifted back to it [the war] involuntarily. And among his dreams it had been the one that most consistently recurred.

The author, the narrator, and the character are all present in this scene: Bowman thinks maybe being a naval officer has so far mattered most; the narrator reveals to us that this is a provisional notion; and the author, it seems to me, suggests that the woman’s “marvelous face,” along with her line and manner of questioning, contend for the truly immortal element. At 45, there were dreams, and uncertainty; but at 87, dear reader, here is reality, and a record of what has mattered. Fiction (character) and memory (author) dance together elegantly here, with a signature strangeness. The minor character feels as important, surely as memorable, as the major one.

3.
All That Is is filled with moments and episodes like these, where a minor player’s story comes forth in full color, detail, and mystery, only to never reappear again.

[One] of his writers had been to school only through the seventh grade though he didn’t explain why. His mother had given him a library card and told him, go and read the books.

“The books. That’s what she said. She’d wanted to be a teacher but she had these children. She was a disappointed woman. She said, you come from decent, hardworking people.  Serious people.”

Serious was the word that had haunted his life…

His name was Keith Crowley. He was a slight man who looked to the side when he talked. Bowman liked him and liked his writing, but his novel didn’t sell, two or three thousand copies was all. He wrote two more, one of which Bowman published, and then dropped from sight.

There are other writers that Salter wants us to remember — individuals and types at once, like the aging William Swangren, who told stories about Greta Garbo, Somerset Maugham, Thornton Wilder, and “talked about…homosexuality in the ancient world, the intercrural pleasures of the Greeks and his own experiences with gonorrhea. It took eighteenth months to cure with a French doctor putting a tube up him every day and painting the lesions with Argyrol.” Bowman was supposed to reject Swangren’s book, but he “liked him so much that he changed his mind about [it]. They took it. Unfortunately, it sold few copies.” There are also publisher types, like Berggren the Swede, who “had been made for women,” married three times, and who sweeps on and off stage in two pages:

With Karen, Berggren did not feel young again but something better. Sex was more than a pleasure, at this age he felt joined to the myths. He had accidentally seen, a few years earlier, a wonderful thing, his mother dressing — his back was to him, she was seventy-two at the time, her buttocks were smooth and perfect, her waist firm. It was in his genes, then, he could perhaps go on and on, but one day he saw something else, perfectly innocent, Karen and a girlfriend she had known since school lying on the grass in their skimpy bathing suits tanning themselves, face down, side by side, talking to one another and occasionally the leg of one of them kicked idly up into the sun that was soothing their bare backs….He did not try to imagine what they were talking about, it was only their idle happiness in doing it while his own habits were less joyful and animated…On that day and other days he accepted the reality of what happened with women he loved, wives, principally, which was one of the things that led, despite his position and intelligence and the high regard in which he was held, to his suicide at the age of fifty-three, in the year that he and Karen parted.

And so in All That Is, there is a compelling and beautiful dance between the foregrounding and backgrounding of characters, lives, narratives. Whereas in the conventional novel, one would neaten up the relative positionings, guide the reader toward narrative priorities, in All That Is Salter reminds us that the “things” of his epigraph are deliberately unspecified; which is notable for a writer known for precision. What happens and what is remembered are distinct narrative lines; the overlap is frequent, yes, but unpredictable; where, how, and why they diverge is deeply interesting. Bowman’s story is told chronologically, and yet each chapter reads like a Rorschach that won’t hold still: here is what happened, here is what is — what will be — remembered. Which of it matters? Yes. Exactly.

4.
But there is a clear throughline for Bowman’s journey, which is a journey from female to female, in search of the ideal in both sex and love. Bowman is a late-bloomer in both these areas, and he comes to them naïve, hopeful: he wants to believe in their purity, their absolute meaning, and is incredulous when he discovers otherwise: “It was not possible that she did not feel as he did,” he thinks, after the first time Vivian expresses disinterest in sex. And yet his faith revives, time and again — he aspires to the pure and the virginal with each encounter — even as it evolves out of innocence into something darker. With Enid, a married Englishwoman, “He felt like a god; they were only beginning,” and

He saw himself now to be another kind of man, the kind he had hoped, fully a man, used to the wonder. Enid smoked cigarettes, she did it only now and again, and breathed out the rich fragrance slowly. The light in the Ritz made her beautiful. The sounds of her high heels. There is no other, there will never be another.

Similarly, his affair with Christine — who later betrays him brutally — is

a brilliant dream…With Christine it would be unimaginably rich, living in the sunlight, on the water, on terraces hidden by vines, in the bare rooms of hotels…He wanted the Greek words for morning, night, thank you, love. He wanted some dirty Greek words so he could whisper them.

In a recent review of All That Is, John Freeman wrote that the book is “riddled with the sentiments about women of a past time,” and that “In bed, Bowman is always in charge.” I find this sort of reaction to Salter — indictments of his supposed social regressiveness — endlessly interesting, because it causes me to interrogate my alternate reaction. Freeman’s observations, strictly speaking, are not inaccurate: but there is the shadow of mistrust in his reading — of Salter the author, for failing to shake an antiquated worldview, which is something I too have certainly felt reading other white male authors. But with All That Is, I found that my own implicit trust in Salter’s vision of both eroticism and romanticism — which has been there since I first read Sport several years ago — began to make sense.

Bowman, an only child raised by his mother, comes to both sex and romance relatively late, and with a singular, strong influence on his budding manhood, which is the war and the qualities of courage and honor he internalized. Like all of Salter’s protagonists, Bowman is both flawed and fundamentally honorable — solitary, resistant to corruption, quietly ambitious, and deeply convinced that the erotic and the Platonic are one in the same; that The act of love is the most serious act of all. There is something distinct about a man discovering his dignity, his pride and valor, prior to his first sexual experience. Freeman compares Bowman to Don Draper, and I too have made similar comparisons between Salter’s world and Matthew Weiner’s. But Don’s psychology as a womanizer is portrayed (in the current season, in fact) as a prurient neurosis, traced back to his having been raised in a brothel by a stepmother who despised him. I once asked Salter about Mad Men, and he hadn’t at the time ever seen the show. And in a previous email, he’d written, “I admire the cardinal virtues, prudence, fortitude, justice, and mercy,” in relation to a question I asked about the relationship between an artist and his work. Admiring and enacting are different things, of course; both Salter and Bowman I believe recognize this. (As for Don Draper, I’m not so sure.)

What goes wrong for Bowman is that he loses the tether to his original influences: the war is long over, his mother has passed, and his friend Eddins, whose interspersed chapters portray the ideal (loving, passionate) mateship that Bowman seeks, has lost that ideal to a tragic accident. Bowman then begins to confound sexual prowess with actual prowess. If All That Is is Bowman’s late-blooming coming-of-age story, then this phase, his late 40s, is his adolescent stage, unseemly and shameless. He commits an ugly act of vengeance, sexual in nature, following Christine’s betrayal, and while the novel does not exactly “punish” him for it, he goes forth into later manhood shaken, self-conscious, and, in the last pages, humbled with gratitude:

He wanted nothing more. Her presence was miraculous…He was unsure of himself and of her. He was too old to marry. He didn’t want some late, sentimental compromise. He had known too much for that. He’d been married once, wholeheartedly, and been mistaken…

By novel’s end, he — Salter, Bowman — has not lost his faith in the seriousness of love, nor the glory of the erotic; but he no longer approaches them with such notions as “attainment,” “possession,” or “supremacy.”

5.
While much has been said about Salter’s sentences — their elegant concision, “expensive” diction, the deftness of surprising pivots, syntax that is both fragmented and polished — Salter himself reportedly wrote to a friend that, with All That Is, he wanted to “get past the great writer-of-sentences thing,” and presumably the “writers’ writer” thing. Has he done it? The book party was held at the home of Salter’s friends Yves-André Istel and Kathleen Begala, at a tony address on Central Park West, notably similar to the location of Phillip Bowman’s first encounter with the narrow gates of social-class access (which are slammed in his face in that scene). A venerable authoress in attendance swooned — over both the novel and the man — when I asked what she thought. When Salter followed Stein’s remarks with a few of his own, he spoke of all the attention the book has been getting and said that it felt like, for once in his literary life, he’d been ushered to the “front of the line.” Later, when I asked him how everything is going, he said, “It’s been big. A lot of stuff. Interviews and coverage. It’s enough to make you envious and me tired.” At 87, Jim Salter did not look tired, but rather energized and elegant, ready as ever to change a tire, then maybe enjoy an excellent martini. “I’ve read the book and will be writing about it,” I said, at that moment not quite sure what I would be writing. He looked up from signing a book none too concerned, an eager fan at his other side. “That would be wonderful,” he replied.

It will reach some sort of tipping point, and suddenly you’re selling not piddling hundreds but thousands of copies. Success will breed more success; it will spread. You know that the chances of it happening are slight, and that you’re being naive to hope for it. But secretly you hope anyway.

I secretly hoped that my debut memoir would make at least a small splash. I knew that by its very nature — it was about my experiences as a new mother of twins, and my struggles with clinical depression during that time — it wouldn’t appeal to everyone. I wasn’t deluded enough to think it would be the next Eat, Pray, Love. But maybe, I hoped, I would get lucky, and it would become the equivalent of that book for expectant or new moms.

In the weeks leading up to the book’s release, I worked tirelessly to get the pieces in place: I contacted bloggers and wrote pieces to submit for publication in conjunction with the release. I lined up readings at bookstores and talks with Mothers of Twins clubs. I Facebooked and Tweeted my fingers to the bone. I waited for something — anything — my publisher was doing on the publicity front to bear fruit. I even, ridiculously, wished for success when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake a month before publication. (A wish that could have been much better spent, in retrospect.)

I hoped, I planned, I pushed, I wished. And then the book was published. I got some very positive reviews, some lovely letters from readers, and a few halfway decent publicity opportunities. But the flame never quite caught. Things just politely smoldered.

2.
One month after Double Time was published, we brought one of our five-year-old twin daughters, Clio, to see her pediatrician. Her legs and hips had been aching, and she was having occasional abdominal pain. She was also having fevers several times a week that would flare in the late afternoons, drain her energy and appetite, and be completely gone by the next morning.

The doctor drew blood for a complete count and tested for Lyme disease and arthritis. The results were all negative. She seemed to be fighting a virus, they said. They were quite certain of this, because her white blood cell count was a little high. Nothing to be alarmed about. Come back if the symptoms persist or get worse, they said.

The symptoms did persist and get worse, and after another cursory visit to the pediatrician, we asked to be referred to a rheumatologist. While we waited for the date of that appointment to arrive, Clio’s fevers became more frequent. She was hobbling from pain in her legs much of the time. Then she began developing isolated hives on her torso and arms that would bloom to the size of a splayed adult hand and vanish within the space of minutes. After several days of this, she spiked a 105-degree fever.

I brought her immediately to the emergency room of our local hospital, where the doctor ordered the same blood tests that had been run three weeks earlier. While I appreciated her thoroughness, I couldn’t imagine the results would be any different such a short time later.

But they were. This time Clio’s white blood cell count was abnormally high. Her platelet and red blood cell counts were abnormally low. She was immediately hooked up to an IV line for antibiotics — her immune system was essentially non-existent at that point, the doctor explained — and we were transferred by ambulance to a hospital in downtown Boston. Less than 48 hours later, Clio had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

“How is it possible,” I asked the oncologist who gave us the news, “that her blood tests were normal three weeks ago? Was it a mistake?”

“Leukemia can do this,” she replied. “The leukemic cells can be brewing in the marrow for months, and then they hit a sort of tipping point and break out into the rest of the body.”

While I’d been planning, pushing, and preparing for my book launch, mutated white blood cells in my daughter’s body had been stealthily multiplying, on a mission to crowd her healthy blood cells out of her marrow and her bloodstream completely. But their success, unlike my book’s, was inevitable.

3.
It’s a commonly held misperception among writers and would-be readers that in order to write a compelling memoir you have to have done or experienced something unusual or extraordinary.

But this is false. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to have had a miserable childhood, an addiction, or a life-threatening disease. You don’t have to have to have scaled Mount Everest blind or done something cleverly intentional like making every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year.

You can write about a friendship, as Gail Caldwell does in her tender memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home. You can write about losing loved ones, as Joan Didion does in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. You can write about becoming a mother, as Anne Lamott does in Operating Instructions.

What makes these books engaging is not the authors’ experiences — none of which are particularly exotic or unique — but how she writes about them. How they change her. How she makes us think or laugh or cry or simply feel less alone.

Likewise, there’s nothing remarkable about the story I relate in Double Time. I give birth to twin daughters, I muddle my way through the first few years of their lives, try to achieve so-called work-life balance, and battle serious clinical depression along the way. It wasn’t the easiest three years of my life, but as I admit to myself in the introduction, it’s hardly an example of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of impossible odds. I didn’t write to book to be that; I wrote it because I thought it would be helpful and entertaining to new and expectant moms. That’s all.

Still, I had to make the same argument to myself — about what makes for a good and worthwhile memoir — on a regular basis as I was writing the book and, later, when I was promoting it. Repeatedly, when my confidence flagged and my inner literary snob rolled her eyes, I reminded myself that I did have the right to tell my story and urge others to read it, and that I wasn’t self-indulgent or narcissistic to do so.

It wasn’t Important Literature; that much I knew (and know) for sure. People wouldn’t be reading it decades from now, except perhaps doctoral students exploring the bizarre, early-21st-century craze for first-person writing about parenthood. But it was worthy of having been written. And people would want to read it. It was a good book. A very good book.

You have to engage in this sort of self-deception if you plan to publish, assuming you aren’t completely confident in and enraptured by your own writing. Otherwise, you might as well keep your manuscript in a drawer.

4.
The first night I spent in the hospital with Clio was the worst night of my life.

While my baby — my very heart — lay hooked up to monitors and bags of fluid, feverish and fitfully sleeping, I cried silently, unable to stop. I hadn’t eaten since that morning and almost fainted in the middle of the night when I got up to use the bathroom. I crawled into Clio’s bed and lay by her side for a while, but the warmth of her body, the familiar, yeasty smell of her perspiring head, the rhythm of her breath, the very aliveness of her — it was almost too much to bear.

At that point I had no idea how treatable childhood leukemia was, and how high the survival rates. I thought I was going to lose her.

Awake at two a.m., knowing that sleep was unlikely, I turned on my laptop and sent brief emails to three of my closest friends explaining what was happening. In my inbox were dozens of conversation threads from the previous few weeks. They included messages from my publicist; from a friend who’d arranged a reading for me at her community library; from a Boston Globe reporter doing a story on my book and me for an upcoming issue. There was a Google alert message for the keywords “Jane Roper” and “Double Time.”

I felt an almost physical sense of revulsion and embarrassment at the very existence of my book. How could I have written something so trite, so flimsy, and so unimportant? (The precious descriptions of the girls’ toddler antics, the stupid jokes about spilled breast milk…) Yes, the book goes into great detail on my struggles with depression, but even this seemed trivial — it didn’t threaten my life; it could be treated with medication, and successfully was — compared to the horror I faced now.

This feeling of shame was followed almost immediately by knife-sharp grief for everything contained in the book’s pages. Between those covers were my daughters’ first words and steps; their tantrums and mishaps; their soft, sleeping faces. On those pages, I’d described in loving detail the strange satisfaction of nursing my girls simultaneously; the secret feel of their eight-limbed movement inside my belly.

Although it was now a year and a half beyond where the book’s narrative ended, and although life changes fast as babies become toddlers become children, the days I described didn’t feel remote. We were still the family I wrote about in the book. Rather, we had been 18 hours earlier.

If recalling my book from the shelves had been possible, I would have set the process in motion that night.

5.
During our first days in the hospital, as we came to understand that we would not be leaving for several weeks while Clio completed the first, intensive phase of chemo, we canceled and revised work and personal obligations accordingly.

I bowed out of that upcoming library reading of Double Time — it was to have been the last stop on the modest “tour” I’d cobbled together for myself — unable to imagine standing before a group of people and reading from my book. Unable to imagine myself ever doing it again. I’d hoped and pushed for a paperback release of the book, but that seemed ridiculous now, too.

And then, two weeks into our hospital stay, the Boston Globe feature story I’d been interviewed for several weeks earlier — the day after Clio’s first visit to her pediatrician, in fact — was published. There I was with the girls on the cover of the Lifestyle pullout section in full color. In the photo, taken on our back porch, my nose is to my daughter Elsa’s cheek, my teeth bared in a silly grimace, while Clio sits at my feet.

She had cancer in that picture. It just hadn’t “broken out” yet.

Any author would have been thrilled to have their book covered in a major story in a major metropolitan paper. And I’d been thrilled, of course, several weeks earlier when I found out that it was going to happen. But now, all I felt was deflated — and (irrationally, I knew) guilty. As if I’d fabricated the whole story and gotten away with it. I felt none of the joy or pride that I’d imagined I would feel when it was published.

And when friends emailed to congratulate me on the story or posted links to it via various social media networks, I was embarrassed. I wanted to protest — no, no, no, please — like the person who genuinely hates being sung “happy birthday” to at restaurants.

I didn’t want the cake with the candle in it. I didn’t want any of it.

6.
Nine moths later, we have settled into the “new normal,” of life with cancer.

The treatments for childhood leukemias are protocolled, meaning that for each form of the disease there are specific courses of treatment. In Clio’s case, that means two and half years of chemo and medications, and frequent clinic visits and doctor appointments. She has a port-a-cath implanted in her chest for blood draws and administration of chemo, which will remain for the duration of her treatment. We have to be ever vigilant of germs, and a fever of 101 or above means an automatic hospitalization for antibiotics and tests.

Although we’ve had a few bumps in the road — a couple of rare, adverse reactions to her chemo, one of which landed Clio briefly in the intensive care unit — Clio is doing well. Our family is doing well, though of course Clio’s illness is a source of stress and worry. At the same time, I am working and writing and generally happy.

Meanwhile, a paperback version of my book is on the verge of being released. When Clio was first diagnosed I couldn’t imagine even wanting this to happen, let alone feeling excited or hopeful about it. If her prognosis were direr, the very idea of the book being resurrected in a new form would probably appall me.

Instead it’s simply strange, knowing that people will read the book having no idea that the lives of its protagonist (me) and the supporting cast have taken a dramatic turn.

Then again, all memoirs are obsolete by the time they’re published to some degree, especially if they describe the recent past, as was the case with mine. Our perceptions of our distant past are more static. But in the year or so (or more) between the time a recent-past memoir is completed and when it is released, the author is that much more emotionally removed from the events she describes. And her life may well have taken dramatic turns. I feel a certain kinship with Joan Didion, whose daughter died in the interim between the completion of her memoir about her experience of her husband’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking, and its publication.

I am asked on a regular basis if I plan to write a book about this new, perilous journey our family is on. Certainly the thought has occurred to me. But it will be some time until I know the answer definitively. Clio has another year and a half of treatment to go — assuming she does not relapse at any point along the way. Even if she does complete her treatment successfully, she will not be considered “cured” until she is disease-free for five years.

With an approximately 90 percent cure rate for her type of leukemia, the odds are entirely in her favor. So there’s a 90 percent chance that if I wrote a memoir about my experiences as a “cancer mom” prior to that five-year mark, the ending — an ending in which we are still a family of four — would still be true at the time of the book’s publication.

But for now, I’m holding that decision at bay, and trying my best to embrace the book I already wrote; trying to remind myself that everything contained within its pages is still valid and still true, despite how distant it may feel from the truth of my life now.

1.
I’d like you to do me a small favor. I’d like you to find a copy of your local daily newspaper and read an account of a ballgame in the sports section. You probably don’t read a printed newspaper anymore, but they do still circulate in most cities and you can find one in one of those brightly colored sidewalk news boxes you walk by every day. So, go buy a paper – it won’t cost you much – and find an account of a sports game played last night.

The details of game itself don’t much concern us here. What I’d like you to look at is how the reporter has chosen to tell the story. If the sport is relatively obscure or if the game wasn’t on TV or radio, the story will most likely open with a hard-news lead: the final score, who scored the go-ahead goal, how the decisive play of the game came about, and so on.

If, on the other hand, the sport is popular enough to have been televised, chances are the story will open with a classic feature lead: some inside dope from the clubhouse, an analysis of a crafty move by the team’s manager, a human-interest tale of a scrappy veteran who overcame injury to make an important play. This is because the reporter knows that anyone who cares about the game watched it the night before or at the very least caught the highlights on ESPN. The outcome of the game has ceased to be news, and to stave off irrelevance, the sportswriter has shifted the focus from what happened to why it happened and what it means.

What you are seeing is the natural evolution of news reporting in the face of technological innovation, and it’s nothing new. For nearly two centuries now, a relentless cycle of innovation, from the steam-operated printing press, to radio, to television, and now the Web, has brought news consumers closer in time and sensual proximity to the information that interests them, and at each step along the way, reporters and editors have had to change how they report the news to accommodate this new reality. This has been true for almost every category of news coverage, with the glaring exception of book reviews, which all too often are written as if the digital revolution of the last twenty years never happened.

You know the kind of book reviews I mean. They are between 800 and 1200 words long, include some basic information about the author and the premise of the book, and offer an opinion on whether the book is worth reading. These sorts of reviews are an artifact of a time before the Internet browser when solid information about the latest books being published was hard to come by. But those days are long gone. Today, anyone trying to decide whether to plunk down $26 for, say, George Saunders’s Tenth of December can log onto Amazon and read nearly 400 reviews of the story collection, helpfully sorted into categories from the wildly positive (five stars) to the extremely negative (one star). If that’s not enough information, a reader can switch over to GoodReads, newly acquired by Amazon, and read dozens more reviews and enter into online discussions with other readers about the book.

Those wishing to escape the Amazon plantation can go to the publisher’s website to learn what the book is about and click around the blogosphere to read any one of dozens of reviews of Saunders’s book. If all that information fails to arouse interest, the reader can bounce back to Amazon or GoodReads or Apple’s iTunes store and let their recommendation engines help point the way to other books that might appeal to a Saunders fan.

None of these sites is without its flaws, of course, but the point is that readers have more information at their fingertips about the content and relative quality of the books they want to read than at any time in history. No wonder standard book reviews are disappearing from newspaper culture pages. Newspapers are designed to deliver news, which by definition means things that their readers don’t already know, and in a world where the contents and quality of a given book have been debated endlessly online, a standard book review that tells readers what a book is about and whether it is any good just isn’t news anymore.

Intelligent literary criticism still matters, and there will always be a place for old-fashioned book reviews, especially when a critic stumbles upon a gem of a book published by a small press that can’t muscle its way into the public consciousness. In those cases, when a book has been unjustly ignored or passed over, a positive review is news. But as the machinery that has enabled what used to be known as “word of mouth” to go online steadily improves and grows, those of us who review books need to stop thinking of ourselves as reporters delivering news and start thinking of ourselves as analysts helping readers make sense of the vast stream of information available about the books our readers want to read.

2.
For those who aren’t news junkies, perhaps the easiest way to understand the difference between hard-news and feature reporting is to think of the two announcers most television and radio stations use to broadcast a game. One of them, Joe Buck, for instance, will do play-by-play, telling you what’s happening on the field. That’s hard news. The other guy, Tim McCarver, say, is the color commentator, offering analysis of strategy and context on the personalities of the players to help you make sense of what you’re seeing. That’s feature reporting, and in an increasingly digital world, literary critics need to become less like Joe Buck and more like Tim McCarver.

That doesn’t mean critics should become pedantic know-it-alls lecturing their readers on the history of the modern novel and spouting a lot of French critical theory. It also doesn’t mean reviewers should start dishing publishing-industry gossip, most of which is trivial, anyway, and has little to do with what’s on the page. It means that we all, those of us who care about books and want to share them with others, need to think more deeply about what we can add to the conversation beyond the premise of the book under review and whether we thought it worked. We need to stop merely dispensing facts and opinions, and start telling stories.

The word “conversation” is key here because in an age of instant information, that is what anyone writing about books is doing: entering an ongoing conversation. I wrote for newspapers once upon a time, and as small-time as those papers were, I wrote in the knowledge that I was the only one talking. My readers couldn’t talk back, nor could my sources. That one-way street is history, and I write now knowing that what I say, when it isn’t simply ignored, can be swept up instantly into a global conversation taking place on far-flung Facebook pages and Twitter feeds over which I have no control and often never even hear about. It is deeply odd to click a link and find your prose translated, badly, into Russian or Portuguese, but it forever changes the way you write.

In the old dead-tree days, a newspaper circulated in a town and people read whatever landed on their doorstep. They had no choice – it was that or the back of the cereal box. Today, everyone writing online has a potentially global platform, but no one is guaranteed an audience, which means that if you are going to be read, you have to offer something no one else has. That can mean eye-catching “charticles” and breathless lists of the “Ten Steamiest Sex Scenes in American Literature” sumptuously illustrated with pictures of pretty young things in various states of undress, but it doesn’t have to. It can mean saying something smart and original that makes people think about a book in a new way.

Every reviewer will tackle the challenges of writing about books in the Internet era in his or her own way, but at the very least anyone hoping to be heard above the digital din needs to approach each review not as an exercise in personal taste – I liked/didn’t like this book, and here’s why – but as a mini-essay using the book under review as the focal point of a larger, more interesting story. In a great many cases, this will mean reviewers having the sense to shut up when they have an opinion about a book but have nothing to add to the conversation beyond whether they liked or didn’t like it. This might be called The Thumper Rule of Literary Criticism: “If you can’t say something interesting – Shh! Say nothing!”

When critics do wade into the conversation, they should be thinking how they can bring a special talent or experience they possess to the table. This can be as simple as having an unusually good eye for how narrative and language works, like James Wood of The New Yorker, whose reviews are worth reading even if you don’t agree with him or intend to read the book he’s talking about. Other times it can entail bringing a deeper knowledge of a subject to bear on a review, such as was the case in Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s legendary 2009 front-page evisceration of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw in the Times’ Book Review. But you don’t have to be a celebrated Harvard prof to have something interesting to say. Maybe you’re a new parent, or a teacher of at-risk kids, or an aficionado of 1950s-era sci-fi, or maybe you’re like my Millions colleague Janet Potter who has set out to read biographies of all the American presidents. All of us has something we know and care about, and when we take on a book, we have to use that insight and passion to provide context – color commentary, if you will – to the reviews we write.

However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less. We are all swimming in information, not just about books but about sports teams and political parties and cooking tips, and what we need are smart, thoughtful commentators to sift through all that data and make it mean something.

Image via Wikimedia Commons