It has taken decades to become the substance I am holding in my hand. In its complex odor is reflected every squall and every cold gray wave. I am smelling months of tidal movement and equatorial heat—the unseen molecular degradation of folded compounds slowly evolving and changing shape beneath its resinous surface. A year of rain. A decade spent swirling around a distant and sinuous gyre. A dozen Antarctic circuits.

Ambergris.

People have used ambergris (‘gray amber,’ French) for a long time — Moctezuma added it to his tobacco, Casanova to his chocolate mousse, England’s King Charles II to his eggs; 17th-century French physicians used it to cure rabies, Florida’s American Indians as an antidote for fish poison, and today, companies like Chanel and Guerlain as fixative in their most expensive perfumes.

But exactly what it is or how it’s produced has a long history of misunderstandings. Before Nantucket whalemen hacked it out of sperm whales’ intestines in the early 18th century, Europeans were mystified by the fragrant nubbins randomly washing ashore. To name a few mistaken sources, among a long list compiled by Kemp, it was at one time or another thought to be the fruit of underwater trees, extra-terrestrial rocks, or fossilized tree sap; the Chinese called it “dragon’s spittle.”

Still, we can’t seem to get it exactly right. Just last month Canadian researchers found that a compound from balsam fir trees can effectively replace ambergris in perfumes. Following the discovery were a number misinformed headlines: “Breakthroughs in Science: ‘Whale Barf’ Is No Longer Needed to Make High-End Perfume” (The Atlantic, 6 April 2012); “Your Perfume may soon be free of Whale Vomit” (New York Daily News, 9 April 2012).

But as the Tasmanian fisherman Louis Smith could have told you — who, Kemp uncovered, in 1891 wormed his way down the bowels of a beached sperm whale to find a 162-pound hunk of ambergris — it definitely is not vomit; it definitely comes out the other end.

Kemp, an American working at New Zealand’s Otago University, became interested in ambergris when a small boulder of tallow washed ashore and, mistaken for ambergris, was sliced up into assumingly small fortunes by the local Kiwis. At $20 per gram, that meant the authentic 32-pounder Lorelee Wright found on an Australian beach in 2006 was worth about $300,000.

After finding disparagingly little literature on ambergris — aside from a handful of passages in old books — Kemp set out to write something like the first Concise History of Ambergris, chapter-to-chapter playing cetologist, maritime historian, and, after he sets out to find his own piece, lottery junkie.

In his treasure hunt, we follow him from distant, windswept coastlines (my favorite, the “biscuit-colored apron of sand” notched in the little wet Stewart Island off the southern coast of South Island, New Zealand) to dusty storage rooms in the bowels of museums.

Along the way Kemp parses centuries of one of the more fanciful natural histories, illuminating a not-so-distant past of scientists flailing around to understand the natural world. Right around the time the first American paper on ambergris was published (1720s, by Zabdiel Boylston, Cotton Mather’s physician), appeared papers on “The Height of a Human Body, between Morning and Night,” and “Some Observations Made in an Ostrich, Dissected by Order of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart.”

It’s hard not to fall in love with ambergris, or the concept of ambergris as the unknowable embodiment of the sea, along with Kemp. Here is a solid lump of whale feces, weathered down—oxidized by salt water, degraded by sunlight, and eroded by waves — from the tarry mass to something that smells, depending on the piece and whom you’re talking to, like musk, violets, fresh-hewn wood, tobacco, dirt, Brazil nut, fern-copse, damp woods, new-mown hay, seaweed in the sun, the wood of old churches, or pretty much any other sweet-but-earthy scent. Borne in whale guts to be crushed and dabbed on the wrists and necks of the elite.

In following Kemp to where spume and salt and storms dash the seaboard — and all the Moby Dick references—I can’t help but think of Ishmael, ruminations on sea and land blowing through the pages. Kemp’s treks along the fringes of distant islands, his ponderous observations of thunderheads — “enormous black columns that tower thousands of feet into the sky” — washing over remote beaches, strike the same chords as Melville’s Ishmael in the crow’s nest, lulled by “the blending cadence of waves with thought, that at last [a young sailor] loses his identity”.

There’s that same ebbing away of self as Kemp tries to find a nubbin that looks and smells both singular and like everything, clear up a history that gets increasingly obscure, pry answers from an almost-legal network of tight-lipped ambergris hunters roaming the beaches with their ambergris-sniffing dogs, and pin down scent-descriptions from lyrical French perfumers until he finally loses track of what he was looking for in the first place, only to find something else.

At some point, he begins to trust ambergris’s mystery. No matter how many pieces he smells and touches, it is as unknowable and varying as the sea. It is, as he noted in his description of its smell, a history of sea itself.

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Toni Morrison’s latest novel, Home, is concerned also with war, injustice, and homecoming. We are in the next decade of the 20th-century, with African-American Frank Money returning from the battlefields of Korea, but the racism is just as ingrained in the country he was fighting for. The ingratitude hasn’t changed either. “You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs,” Frank is told. Morrison starts her tale and Frank’s odyssey in a hospital: Frank wakes up, bound and sedated, but has no recollection of how he came to be there. He receives a mysterious letter urging him to hurry home to his sister. “She be dead if you tarry.” Frank, bitter and brimming with self-loathing, has been back in America for a year but has been unable to bring himself to head back to his native Georgia. The letter gives him the spur he needs. He breaks out of his “crazy ward” and starts his journey, first barefoot through snow, then shod and fed and with $17 in his pocket from a charitable minister. Soon he is weaving from state to state, plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder, but finally charged with both direction and purpose.

Morrison interlards Frank’s narrative with those of the other characters in his life. We meet Ycidra, or Cee, the sister in distress. After years of putting up with her grandmother’s malice (Cee, born in the street, was thus tormented with the tag “gutter child”), she ran away from home at 14 with a ne’er-do-well called Prince. When she is left “broken down, down into her separate parts,” she starts again by securing a job from a white doctor called Beauregard Scott. Morrison deftly showcases Cee’s naivety in a short scene where she peruses Scott’s books with titles such as The Passing of the Great Race and Heredity, Race and Society, and then mulls over the meaning of “eugenics.” The other woman in Frank’s life is, or rather was, Lily, his brief romantic interest, before both realize he is too damaged to be tender, too raw to love. Sex is “bed work,” a “duty,” and when he eventually walks out on her, the loneliness she feels gives way to a calming solitude, “a shiver of freedom.”

Frank travels in the present but on the way his troubled mind casts back, conjuring up scarred thoughts and memories from his time in Korea. He witnessed the deaths of his two childhood friends — the three of them joining the army to escape the hometown they loathed and the limited job prospects of work in cotton fields they didn’t own, just like their parents before them. Reliving their deaths goads him on. “No more people I didn’t save. No more watching people close to me die. No more.” Frank’s unswerving loyalty to his sister means he will stop at nothing to complete his quest. War has left plenty of residual cruelty sloshing around in him. He will kill anyone who has touched her. He fights a pimp and keeps punching him when he is unconscious, fuelled by a reawakened lust for blood — “The thrill that came with each blow was wonderfully familiar.” Morrison is sparing in detailing the carnage of war, but there is one neat twist that she withholds until the end, which suggests that Frank is so corroded by remorse that his sister-saving op will only grant him so much redemption.

Frank rescues a very mutilated Cee — whose job description of “medical assistant” should instead have read “guinea pig” — and spirits her home to Lotus, the town the pair did everything they could to flee from (presumably based, as in previous novels, on Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up). This is home and hearth, but of the tough, hardscrabble variety. And yet, both seem to have come full circle. Frank finds it hard to believe he once hated the place; Cee goes one step further by declaring “This is where I belong.” Home and belonging have been salient themes throughout Morrison’s long career. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, begins with a description of two homes, the MacTeers’ and the Breedloves’, both humble, but the former full of warmth and love. The latter is less so, and the youngest family member, Pecola Breedlove, craves a safer sanctuary and sense of community. This warped homely ideal is a typical Morrison trope. We see it again in Sula — Nel’s home is clean and orderly whereas Sula lives among chaos and disorder. Home, in Morrison’s fiction, is frequently a dwelling and seldom a haven. Milkman Dead in Song of Solomon comes from a home stuffed with material privilege but the Dead house lives up to its name – an empty shell devoid of life. In Jazz Joe and Violet Trace depart the South for the “City” and discover quickly it is no Promised Land. Morrison saves her most mordant variation on home for Beloved: the Kentucky plantation on which Sethe Suggs is enslaved is called Sweet Home.

The subverted home-sweet-home sentiment is utilized again in Home. Lotus, for Frank, is a town of dead-ends, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefields.” Navigating the town’s transportation system is also “rougher than confronting a battlefield.” Much as she yearns for her own house, poor Lily is thwarted, first because of the “restrictions” regarding race in the neighborhood she desires, and second because Frank isn’t able to share her house-hunting enthusiasm. (The two friends he loses in Korea are his “homeys,” but this is the closest he comes to being a homeboy.) A good home seems to be reserved for the lucky few. In one short section, Morrison makes patently (and poetically) clear who does the real living and who the house-tending:

It was 7:30 a.m. when he boarded a bus filled with silent day-workers, housekeepers, maids, and grown lawn boys. Once beyond the business part of the city, they dropped off the bus one by one like reluctant divers into inviting blue water high above the pollution below. Down there they would search out the debris, the waste, resupply the reefs, and duck the predators swimming through lacy fronds. They would clean, cook, serve, mind, launder, weed, and mow.

Morrison makes no mention of skin color here. The bus travel and the jobs do the work for her. She employed a different, more overt approach in Sula, spelling it out for us that Nel is “the color of wet sandpaper” and Sula “a heavy brown with large quiet eyes” (and both “wishbone thin and easy-assed”). In Home she prefers to leave us to infer, and rightly so, that a doctor is white or a minister is black, guiding us only by denoting a character’s vernacular and social standing.

But for all its strengths, Home still falls short. This is partly due to its length. Marilynne Robinson’s Home, of “real” novel length, was roomier, with more space for the characters to breathe (two of whom were also like Frank Money, turning up unexpectedly in their hometown after considerable time away). Morrison tries to pack just as much into her 140-something pages and the result is a busy cast bursting with potential, but characters who are so hamstrung in their tight confinement, so seldom on the page, that their tales are only half-told. Perspectives shift to give us another character’s insight and history, but ultimately we feel as if we hardly know them. A whole batch of them gestate but never hatch. Instead of honing in on a small, crucial ensemble, Morrison prefers to pan out and mint more secondary characters, even in the closing pages. James Wood has accused Morrison of loving her characters too much. Such mollycoddling “hotly hugs the life out of them” — a case in point being Frank himself, who is severely half-baked, all pent-up rage and muttered threats that never come to anything. He avenges his friend’s death in Korea by shooting an old one-legged civilian; he describes how picking cotton “broke the body but freed the mind for dreams of vengeance;” and, just prior to freeing Cee from the doctor’s clutches, he experiences “Thoughts of violence alternating with those of caution.” Unfortunately, and perhaps improbably, it is that caution that wins the day, despite Morrison’s grandiose build-up. In a dismal display of bathos, he rescues Cee calmly and wordlessly, all that bloodthirsty vengeance evaporating in the process. Nowhere do we witness Perlman’s “small acts of resistance.” Big angry Frank Money is all bluster.

Morrison wraps up the proceedings with a saccharine bow-out, loving Frank and Cee so much as to endow them with peace of mind and even douse them in the soft-focus “glow of a fat cherry-red sun.” Mercifully, the impact from the bulk of the book lingers — the poignant depiction of a sundered family, the unflinching portrayal of war — for us to brusquely write the whole thing off. If only Morrison had concluded it otherwise: keeping Frank enraged, a victim of his own exaggerations (“home” still being akin to a Korean battlefield) not to mention his own worst enemy. When still with Lily, instead of sharing her passion to find a home, he tells her all he wants to do is “Stay alive.” Trudging through Atlanta he is mugged by five “sneaks” and then dusted down by a Samaritan who warns him to “Stay in the light.” We would prefer a compromise: we like Frank alive, but wish Morrison with her too-big heart had kept him in the shade. That, along with swapping her scattershot sketching for broader, splashier, and more daring brush strokes on a wider canvas, and Home would have been up there with Morrison’s best.

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Ahead, where the highway was only a pencil line into the distance, two dark low bumps became visible on the horizon, backed by blue sky in which there was not a floating cloud. I wouldn’t have seen the bumps if I hadn’t looked where Mildred was looking. It was Canada there. Indistinguishable. Same sky. Same daylight. Same air. But different. How was it possible I was going to it?

The two dark low bumps cohere into huts for customs officials on this lonely border road, and once Dell passes them, the novel, which has been spinning its wheels for more than 200 pages, suddenly locks into gear and begins to cruise toward greatness. In part, this sense of velocity is literal: after weeks of hanging around waiting for his parents to commit the idiotic crime announced on the first page of the novel, Dell is finally on the move, in the back of a car driven by a near-stranger, observing the world not through the eyes of a bored and perplexed teenager, but through the eyes of a first-class novelist inhabiting the consciousness of a frightened 15-year-old boy. Buzzards hang “in the sky, curving and motionless.” The night air is “sweet as bread.” The land itself is not merely land, but in a marvelously unforced way, an indicator of the narrator’s sense of loss and lostness:

Once we were out of the hills, there were no landmarks…There were even fewer trees. A single low white house with a windbreak and a barn and a tractor could be seen in the distance, then later another one. The course of the sun would be what told you where you were — that and whatever you personally knew about: a road, a fence line, the regular direction the wind came from.

Ford’s characters, too, which in the American portions of the novel, have been largely made up of loose collections of physical description and character tics, become stranger and far more interesting once we hit Canada. The first person Dell meets in Canada is the novel’s single great achievement: a gruff, unsavory Métis Indian named Charley Quarters, who lives alone in a filthy trailer and spends his days leading Americans on geese-hunting expeditions, but also wears lipstick and eye shadow and writes poetry.

Charley Quarters is the real thing, the sort of character who could exist nowhere but in fiction, but who feels utterly alive and real on the page, and for 50 pages or so, this odd, misbegotten novel comes alive as Dell settles into his strange new world, living in a shack in the middle of ghost town in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding prairie. And then — splat — the book dies again, never to show any more than the occasional sign of life for another hundred-odd frustrating pages.

In truth, Canada is two novels, neither of which has much to do with the other, or, for that matter, with Dell, its ostensible narrator and central character. In the first novel, set in Montana in the summer of 1960, Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva Parsons, rob a bank in a manner so criminally inept and for reasons so lacking in basic common sense that Ford is forced to spend dozens of pages just making it sound like actual human beings might do such a thing. The second novel, set in the fictional town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, focuses on Arthur Remlinger, a mysterious American hotelier and one-time political hothead who is in hiding after committing a politically motivated crime in Detroit years before.

Neither of these crimes, along with a double murder that, again, Ford announces on page one, make much sense, but from the reader’s point of view, the far larger problem is how little they touch on the life of the narrator. The bank robbery, which puts his parents in jail and causes his twin sister, Berner, to run away to her own, separate fate, radically alters the trajectory of Dell’s life, but up until then, it really has nothing to do with him. For 200 pages, Dell moons around Great Falls, friendless, reading obsessively about chess and beekeeping, while his idiot father loses job after job and gets on the wrong side of some no-good local Indians, leading him to conclude that his only hope is to pack his wife in the car and rob a bank in North Dakota without bothering to wear a mask or otherwise cover his tracks.

Once in Canada, after a few chapters in which Dell finally seems to be participating in his own life, Ford loses interest in his fate and changes the subject to Arthur Remlinger’s crime, which has even less to do with Dell than the bank robbery. The reader is asked to wade through page after page of exposition about what Arthur did years ago and why he did it, largely delivered in summarized dialogue by Charley Quarters. Why is Charley telling young Dell all this? I couldn’t figure that one out, but by then, frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.

One comes away from Canada feeling as though a less gifted author was trying to write a knock-off of a Richard Ford novel, and has made a hash of it. All the classic Fordisms are there: the sensitive teen at the mercy of hopelessly bad parents, the lonesome Western landscapes, the borderline clichés dressed up as prairie wisdom, the sense that all is in elegy to a lost and fallen world. But unlike in Ford’s best work — the first two Frank Bascombe novels, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and the excellent story collection, Rock Springs — where all this stuff works, in Canada, the old Ford magic comes off as half-baked and pretentious.

Richard Ford has earned his place in the pantheon of late-20th-century American novelists, and 15 years ago, one could plausibly argue he was among the best Americans writing, but his later work — that is, most of what he’s done since he won the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day in 1996 — has seemed of a lesser quality. Now, this new book, Canada, exhibits a degree of badness that makes one wonder if the earlier stuff was really all that good. Wasn’t Frank Bascombe always a wee bit of a gasbag? Didn’t some of the stories in Rock Springs seem a little, well, contrived?

If you have a soft spot in your heart for Frank Bascombe and the other hard-luck characters in Ford’s earlier fiction, you may well want to skip this trip across the border.

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When I read Stephen Akey’s piece on Philip Larkin recently in The Millions, I knew I’d found a fellow clerk. Akey, it turned out, had a thematic, albeit totally non-personal, connection with Larkin: they were both librarians. Further, they were distressed librarians; librarians that perhaps wished not to be anymore, but still found themselves drawn to the work anyhow.

Akey had written about his time working in the New York City library system in a slim monograph aptly titled Library. This book is not new. Nor is it newish. Go back to that mystical, hazy year of 2002. Terror alerts, Beltway sniper, and No Child Left Behind. Situated? Good, because that’s when it was released.

I’d bet a large, expensive case of microbrew that not many people took notice when the book came out. Orchises Press, out of George Mason University, is run by, from what I can tell, one brave soul: Roger Lathbury (Google him; he seems like a trip: a master of the limerick). In some ways, the non-event makes sense. Subject matter: libraries. Prose style: witty and erudite, but playful. (The jacket copy describes it as “coruscating,” which means to flash or sparkle.) That is to say, not the kind of work that flies off shelves. Library is dense and light at the same time: an off-putting combination. But it works well. Probably because Akey’s tone is one molded on self-defense and self-deprecation, then flung onto a potter’s wheel that’s running off the irksome yet fatigued energies of a harried cataloger in a dizzying bureaucracy of a major public library system. For comparison, read the letters of Philip Larkin. Shit, read anything by Larkin. Their outlooks aren’t exactly the same (Akey tends toward the optimistic at least once a page, while Larkin seemed almost content within his status as fussbudget), but they’re brothers-in-arms. It’s no surprise that Akey devotes his first chapter as a pseudo-encomium to the Bard of Hull’s primary profession.

It was drones like me who kept that library running.

This is no joke. Drones are essential. I was a drone. Once, I saw a particularly haggard patron clear a shelf of all books on Buddhism and stack them on a table as if he was going to read all of them… at five to ten at night… right as the library was closing. I had just finished cleaning the main floor of its remnants. Shelving is grunt work, but interesting. It’s armchair sociology and psychology. For example, you cover the windows and set me to shelving books, and if I found more than one Lonely Planet guide to a country south of the equator, I know it’s fall going into winter. Books speak better than humans sometimes. Why do we slyly inspect others’ reading choices when sitting on the bus, train, or waiting in an airport terminal? Checking out a stack of books on family disturbances or spousal negligence? ‘Nuff said. So we think.

From time to time library pundits write columns describing catalogers as glorified clerks whose arcane and terminally boring job duties could be better performed by nonlibrarians at lower cost and higher productivity. Furthermore, catalogers are unimaginative technicians, rule-bound reactionaries, and, probably, serial masturbators.

While Akey is mostly a cataloger in this narrative, the apparent message is that certain jobs are utterly necessary (i.e., catalogers) and that those jobs are also inherently shit upon. (Think: teachers, social workers, custodial staff.) Forever and always. And did you know that non-administrators within the World of the Library are treated like pawns in a massive political chess game? It’s true. Akey’s journey from one library and department to another is picaresque, and, in its own way, heartbreaking. Not the less so because Akey is telling — importuning, really — us in each short chapter to grasp why libraries are so damn important to a functioning society. The crew of characters that make up that semi-functioning society is almost from central casting. The gregarious and learned boss who is exceedingly opinionated, the sassy ethnic women, the prig female boss, the quiet shuffling, no-faced, no-named co-workers who never fail to get Akey a gift or food every time he packs up and leaves a job only to come crawling back years later. To call the book a comedy of errors is disingenuous, but not untrue. Nor is it mock epic or straight autobiography. Even memoir is a feeble descriptor. What Library attempts, I think, is to zoom in on this gift we’ve been given: the public library. Peter Best, an old hand in one of the libraries I’ve worked at, would every day mention how Benjamin Franklin was to thank for our jobs. But what is the library lending today? And what if the library doesn’t offer it? Libraries need numbers to earn funding. Thus…

Still, if the goal is simply to fill libraries with bodies, you have to wonder if it’s worth the effort.

And yet the library is brought down to a capitalistic level. Yes, down to that level. Akey both informs and then passes judgment on the role of libraries playing on and into the more whimsical passions of the average library patron. He himself has gotten into verbal scuffles with folks who ardently believe the library is only there to supplement public fancies. Should libraries buy scads of the hottest bestseller? Or should they break themselves upon the rocks of serious scholarship? Cheeseburger in Paradise or Paradise Lost? Perhaps, somewhere in between?

To speak of “classics” or “serious” books is, of course, to invite the inevitable charges of elitism and snobbery. I believe that we call some books classics for reasons other than ideological and that we can save a lot of time by not pretending that we don’t know, more or less, what the word “serious” means. Fortunately, the people who run public libraries are not being asked to deliver a verdict on the legacy of Western culture and the validity of the literary canon. What they ought to be doing, and increasingly are not, is building and maintaining collections that make information available on such questions. I’ve listened to enough complaints on the reference desk to know that there are people interested in such matters and they’re not all on the faculty at Stanford. The public library is all they’ve got.

Library ends up not as a tract of pure populism, but as a pamphlet for common sense — that more contentiously charged phrase of late. What I like about this excerpt — which was from a small essay Akey had previously published and inserted into the book — is how he courts small controversy and shies away at the same time. “[W]e can save a lot of time by not pretending that we don’t know, more or less, what the word ‘serious’ means.” Pretty much saying that we all know what’s schlock and what’s bound to live on the shelves for decades. But this argument of highbrow and lowbrow is such a verboten subject for many. Why? Why can’t a library say that its job is to house the best of what’s existed and what’s being published, so the patrons can come and use this information at their disposal? Because, as Akey mentions, it’s not the job of the library to decide tastes and “deliver a verdict” on the canon.

When I worked at the University City Library in St. Louis, I saw the scaffolding of a society come together. Poor, rich, middle-class. Black, white, Asian, Indian, Russian, Orthodox Jews. All in one place, all doing  the same thing: consuming culture in one form or another. And, I think, yes, the public library is the last bulwark against a totally ignorant and lackadaisical society. If the opportunity is there for patrons to access the material, then there’s hope. We can’t make people read Paradise Lost, but at least it’s there. That’s grand talk. I’m already assuming that friends and readers would offer the internet as an alternative to this democratic bastion of knowledge, but you don’t physically mingle with other people on the internet, and you don’t get to see real lived society in action on the internet. That’s the beauty of libraries, and that’s what I think Akey shows in his book. The best scenes are the ones where he’s dealing with the less poetic uses of a library: as a haven for those in rough neighborhoods. There’s a section toward the end where he’s sent to Red Hook to help manage a branch library. There he encounters stark racial and class differences and understands how a library can be more than just a place that houses books to be read. In a way, the books become the symbolic bulwark mention before.

I appreciate a man who finds fascination in the seemingly banal, and Akey mystifies the banal, like Borges.

What makes formulating Dewey numbers so much fun is moving point by point along a narrowing spectrum of subcategories. Thus, the call number for a book about snow (551.5784) is subsumed by the call number for frozen precipitation (551.578), which is subsumed by the call number for hydrometeorology (551.57), which is subsumed by the call number for meteorology (551.5), which is subsumed by the call number for earth sciences (550), which is subsumed by the call number for natural sciences (500). Rather elegant, don’t you think?

As I’m a devotee of the Library of Congress catalog system, I’ll say this was the first time I’ve found a more grounded respect for the Dewey numbers.

Lastly, I don’t want people to think that the book is some stalwart stand on how amazing libraries are, because Akey doesn’t hesitate to show the seedier side of them. Also, I want to say this book is laugh out loud funny. Akey reminds the reader that, as a reference librarian, you’re sort of duty-bound to answer everything to the best of your ability, no matter how foolish or queer. I’ll end with one of my favorite bits in the book:

Among reference librarians it is axiomatic that people frequently do not ask the question they really intend: What was the date of the Challenger explosion? rather than, What was the name of the black astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion? Furthermore, at least in Telephone Reference, the helpful hints provided by patrons were not to be taken on faith. “I read an article in the New York Times two years ago” might mean “I read an article in the New York Post six years ago,” and”‘Don’t bother with Bartlett’s Quotations, I’ve already checked,” meant that Bartlett’s should very much be bothered with.

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Drowning in endless meta-analysis, classic recordings become easily reinspected via deluxe reissues, documentaries, tours recreating albums start-to-finish, oral histories, YouTube wormholes, and countless fan-driven back-channels, until their tracks get worn down and dulled by the proverbial gaze. The best of Continuum’s ongoing series — they just accepted proposals for volumes 87 and up — seem to effortlessly bypass the morass, becoming not only distinct cultural objects, but ones that actually enhance the aura of the originals. The books’ 4¾” x 6½” dimensions are about an inch too wide to be comfortably pocket-sized — the age of skinny jeans has not been kind to pocket paperbacks — but along with their black borders and color schemes matched from the covers of the LPs described therein, they are instantly recognizable. Their lack of titles besides those of the original albums somehow imbues them with paradoxically more identity.

The 33 1/3 books are books in the deepest possible way, in a manner that seems to grow rarer by the year: the cheap, usable kind of book that might eventually enter circulation at used bookstores and garage sales, making themselves (and their subjects and writers) that much less likely to slip into oblivion. Adding to the warmly mechanical aura of the series is its genuine pulpiness. At ten dollars retail, and often stamped out on-demand by Amazon, not all of the titles are winners, though misfires are often less due to a hackjob and more because a fan can’t quite quite get it all out. That or plain over-thinking. The treasures are real, though, ranging from deliciously researched monographs (Douglas Wolk’s Live at the Apollo, Amanda Petrusich’s Pink Moon) to imaginative and aching novellas (John Darnielle’s Master of Reality, John Niven’s Music From Big Pink) to finely honed fan-letters (Mike McGonigal’s Loveless), cultural critiques (Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love), and dozens of other approaches.

For noted paperback-head Jonathan Lethem (another chapter: “Is Fear of Music a Science Fiction Album?”) the form is a perfect match. He quickly lands on an elegant solution to the structural problem of how to write about an album, danced with by all of 33 1/3′s seven-dozen alums. Lethem simply alternates chapters named after tracks with chapters titled something else, in this case, his playful questions. It is a near-perfect workaround. The book stays focused on Fear of Music as experienced and Lethem resists the urge to slip too deeply into its creators’ timeline in anything beyond a passing way. The resultant text somehow manages to create the illusion of living wholly within the original record’s 40 minute, 40 second duration, despite taking (most likely) longer to read.

The answer to another question — Is Fear of Music a Jonathan Lethem Book? — is also a hearty yes. Conveying far more truth about music than his ostensible indie rock novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, it sometimes functions like a Critical Edition appendix to Fortress of Solitude. Beginning with Lethem as a 15-year old listening to the radio alone in his bedroom, the writer admits, “I’ve dragged [my teenage self] into the light of so many contexts he ought to be pictured by now as if blackened from head to toe with font.” But, perhaps because it’s everything a 33 1/3 title should be — readable, not too abstract, a good introduction to an album’s culture, and album culture as a whole – -it turns out to be a fine thing (just this once) that “the keyboard’s entirely in the kid’s hands.”

“Turn it up, for fuck’s sake,” Lethem suggests as he is supposed to in the book’s forward, but the most appropriate method of consumption might be headphones, where the experience of the Talking Heads’ music and Lethem’s writing might be that much more integrated, producer Brian Eno’s subtle treatments filling the spaces between words. Here’s Lethem on the fade-in intro to “Cities”:

The next ambulance is audible from miles away, klaxons screaming, tires swerving and juttering on blacktop, chassis screaming across the horizon, the whole thing lit up like, well, a house on fire… Hearing it approach, you understand this party has no beginning or end, never stops, only moves on to the next town.

Deftly, Lethem describes the sound and feeling of the recording while gracefully connecting it to the songs around it — in this case, “Life During Wartime” and “Mind.” Not to give too much away about Lethem the Younger’s activities, but still another chapter title is “So Fear of Music is a Concept Album. What Happens on Side Two?” Locating and tracing a path to the album’s center in the single-word song titles and internal hashtags — fear, music, mind, cities, air, and others — he establishes a basic language for the album that checks out with his teenage and contemporary selves. It adds up easily, piece by piece. This is no Greil Marcus imagining Bob Dylan gurgling with the breath of a Civil War soldier, but a conscientious listener pulling lovingly on Byrne’s threads, using them to find passage to a bigger well of ideas behind them.

As in a concert film where the musicians subtly grow louder when the cameras focus on them, Lethem’s observations — about the lyrics or otherwise — act as something like a conceptual remastering job on the record, inevitably transforming the reader’s next listen, with new lyrics, guitar parts, and ambiences coming to the foreground. In this way, Lethem’s treatment of Fear of Music demonstrates in a precise, direct way just what it is possible to get out of cultivating a deep relationship with an individual recording.

At one point, Lethem links “Heaven” to a “Fear of Nowhere sequence” within the bigger Heads songbook, stretching from 1978′s “Big Country” to 1985′s “Road to Nowhere.” But Fear of Music — Lethem’s Fear of Music, that is, not the Heads’ — is definitively not nowhere. Consumed at the right age (much like Talking Heads’ music itself), Fear of Music — a cool little green and black paperback — might provide a young reader/listener with a friendly road to somewhere indeed, connecting her to a much bigger conversation about art and life and music. And for a Talking Heads fan who might’ve overplayed Fear of Music into oblivion, it might provide a surprising and welcome road home.

But no matter what metaphors Lethem’s book provokes through its arch self-reference, it always gracefully reinforces its sheer bookiness. The reading experience is surely better while listening to Talking Heads (much in life is), but it’s not strictly necessary. Lethem recreates the album so thoroughly that — listening or not — one is destined to end up in the self-contained world of his book, the Talking Heads themselves appearing in pantomime, but still playing rather loudly, at a party that might never really stop, even after the last page.

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First, the timing of Womanthology, the first in a planned series spearheaded by Renae De Liz, could not have been more apt. 2012 has already sadly been marked by political warfare against women’s civil and reproductive rights, and those on the attack show no sign of easing up. Into this environment, De Liz and her editorial team offer 300 pages filled with short comics all written and drawn by women. Thematically, the focus is on the heroism and strength within all women. And the closing chapters are devoted to instruction and advice on creating comics and making it in the industry.

Second, Womanthology in many ways is a signpost for the ongoing evolution of comics over the past several decades. The comics world was for many years comprised of the superhero titles of DC and Marvel, two dominant, fraternal, meticulously run businesses, and a few other publishers for profitable niches. The key word in that sentence was “fraternal,” for the vast majority of creators working in the majors were men. Today, as any walk through one of the conventions will reveal, there are independent companies, digital distributors, and other channels all willing to take on stories from any genre, many of which would have once been considered not commercially viable by publishers. Moreover, the business model of creator-owned work, in which writers and artists have full rights to their material as opposed to the total ownership DC and Marvel have over their properties, made comics less oligarchic and more accessible to aspirants.

This shift, one which, far from over, is still breaking new ground, has allowed female artists to proliferate as never before. It is fitting that this rise is marked by a hardcover coffee-table-sized book under the imprint of independent comics giant IDW. And it becomes more fitting considering how the book features a varied spectrum of talent, from established Eisner winners to rising stars whose work has made its greatest impact on the Internet. And even more fitting when one considers how the proceeds from the $30 price tag, still a relative bargain for a title of this size, are earmarked for charitable institutions. This is not only a generous action, but also a savvy one that perpetuates the ideal of creation for the sheer joy of creating apart from profit, an idea in firm accordance with the book’s “anyone and any woman can do this” spirit.

These factors should not be overlooked, but simultaneously they run the risk of making Womanthology feel like a grand-scale project laden with significance that dares you to dislike it no matter how dubious its quality. Overlooking the trappings leads to one key question: Is the book any good?

A thorough discussion of graphic narrative must consider the art, the writing, and how they serve each other. And to begin with, the art is uniformly terrific. Reflecting the diversity of talent, Womanthology, already established as an all-female artistic project, doubles as a sampler of the full spectrum of possibilities within comics art. There are certainly many pages of traditional pen and ink art in the DC and Marvel modes, all of it technically accomplished and frequently lovely, but it sits side by side with a variety of styles. To name just three, a flip through the pages reveals the ornate hand-drawn Victoriana of Janet K. Lee, the elaborate digital creations of Lois Van Baarle, and the endearing black-and-white near-stick figures of Stacie Ponder (whose extended episode from her web comic RPG runs along the bottom border for the book’s duration and provides a witty counterpoint to the sometimes weighty main material).

The stories that the art tells are a different matter. Arguably, there has never been an anthology which one could count as a 100 percent success, as the personal tastes of the editor will not match those of every reader, and with 300 pages and 150 artists, there are a few misses scattered among the hits.

This is partly due to the book’s format, which favors the art in mixing stories with a maximum six-page length and single-page illustrations akin to paintings, putting less of a premium on the words. Some stories suffer because they feel incomplete, a larger narrative forced by necessity into a compressed space. At the same time, the interaction between words and pictures in comics, among its many advantages, allows for storytelling and theme to be conveyed through image as much as word. A number of the writers tell stories so unsubtle in their meaning that the panels have nothing to show, with the overall effect one more pedantic than artistic.

That the hits are far greater in number is a credit to De Liz and her editors Laura Morley, Jessica Hickman, Mariah McCourt, Bonnie Burton, Suzannah Rowntree, and Nicole Falk. The theme of “heroic” can be conveyed with so many different tones — inspiring, dramatic, humorous — that the book never becomes monotonous. And in choosing stories, the editorial team effectively switches back and forth between perfectly-realized miniatures which tell a complete tale in two to six pages (“Margarite and Leopold,” “The Little Stranger,” “Warrior,” and “Lost Treasure,” to name just four), and others that read like the enticing first installments of continuing series, leaving the reader pleasantly craving more (an untitled story from De Liz herself, “The Dream Weaver,” “Glimmer”).

Criticism of Womanthology: Heroic must end with a full-circle return to the aspects beyond content. For the artistic quality comes from a double motivation on the part of the artists involved: to have fun, and to create a book with a positive, timeless message. Much of the art and stories depict heroism not as part of a high fantasy or super-powered realm, but as a quality any individual can demonstrate every day to affect genuine change. Further, this message comes via a book celebrating the shape of graphic narrative to come from a vibrant sector of its community. There is little doubt that all 300 artists were working with an ideal audience in mind — themselves in their youth — working to forge another generation of female creators. This combination of fine aesthetics and noble aims makes the Womanthology a work of female empowerment more relatable and moving than any psychology or parenting text. It’s a book to be given as a gift for decades to come, as long as the period when the two majors ruled the comics world…by which time this specific need for a Womanthology may hopefully have passed.

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The novel looks back at the year Cal turned 14, when John Gaunt, the man who owns the fishing company on which most of the men — and thus by extension the town’s existence — depend, suddenly died. With his father gravely ill, Gaunt’s wayward son Richard has returned, and upon the old man’s demise almost immediately threatens to sell the fleet out from under them, partly as revenge on a town which never let him fit in.

Cal’s father is one of the many local fishermen who sail off to the Bering Sea every fall, working that vanishing class of jobs which trade on rough masculinity. “I don’t want to romanticize their work because I’ve never done it,” Cal narrates. “But they romanticized it because they suffered for it… It had to be part of some larger destiny, the fight to stay awake and alive had to be turned, somehow, from drudgery to heroism.” These men are ugly as a bunch of pirates, scarred, limping, with fingers bitten off by bait feeders and crooked features, and Dybek draws them with vivid characterizations. Richard in particular is snotty, witty, lost, a poignant and pathetic figure, self-centered, self-aware but incapable of steering his own life. As much as Cal is used to idolizing his father, it is with Richard that he shares too much in common, both black sheep who may or may not possess the courage to make lives for themselves elsewhere. Cal isn’t exactly plucky. More authentically boyish, he’s morose and bored, sensitive, confused, and mean-spirited; conflicted about his father and as lonely for his mother as he is angry at her disloyalties.

Cal’s mother, a schoolteacher from Santa Cruz with a taste for foreign films and jazz, made an uneasy transition to Washington state from the start, never even making a friend there save John Gaunt. Like any good adventure hero, Cal is effectively orphaned early on in the book, when his father ships out for the season and the boy refuses to accompany his mother as she splits back to California. Marooned in a social and physical landscape imbued with violence, Cal is soon stalked by a moral danger when his father and a group of local men decide they’re willing to do anything to save the fleet. “The problem” with life, he comes to suspect, “was that choice was a cruel illusion.”

The book’s title refers to an invention of Cal’s normally taciturn father. Pressed upon years ago by his Treasure Island-besotted son, the elder Bollings concocted bedtime adventures about the murderously greedy Captain Flint. These tales focused on Flint’s early days, a time before Stevenson’s famous villain lost his ethical footing, foreshadowing the storyteller’s own slide.

Dybek’s not the only author to recently call upon Stevenson as a point of departure. Where Sara Levine went resplendently over the top in Treasure Island!!!, among other things making a farce of contemporary narcissism, Dybek has gone darker, clothing his story in a classically romantic aesthetic.

This romantic aura gives Dybek — who isn’t just alluding to Stevenson, but also riffing on Richard II, and something of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer while dropping in Japanese auteurs and Greek mythology — room to wield his references portentously, to weave in heavily freighted dreams and the vaguely supernatural. Dybek conjures his island with rich physical details, with crashing and shrieking, rain thrumming, waves tumbling, prose steeped in an atmosphere that occasionally borders on Gothic: “fog sank through the trees and onto the cemetery paths,” and every once in a while goes baroque: “The sea a gray mouth, waves poking like tongues.” Dybek avoids getting mired in style, however, marshaling the narrative along with an almost flawless sense of timing and pace.

Written from the point of view of 14 years hence, it is also peppered with melancholy questions: “Who decides what we keep and what we lose?”; “Why do we want to be closest to people in their most private moments?”; “How can I be more like you if you don’t help me?” Though positioned as recent history — the year is 1986 — its hint of the 19th century seems a fitting register for a mournful novel concerned with the weight of tradition. Cal is keenly aware of the ways communities define themselves through fictions, and Dybek’s impressive debut acknowledges how hard it can be to grow up when to cling to Loyalty is to go down with the ship.

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The novel opens in the middle of the night, during a downpour, “so unceasing that it amounted to silence,” as the colonel is roused by two soldiers who take him to claim the body of his youngest daughter, Parvaneh, so he can prepare the corpse for burial. From this starting point, Dowlatabadi’s nonlinear episodes jump in time and perspective, a puzzle as fragmented whole as when it is in pieces, an appropriate quality for a book about the shattering of individuals and national identity.

Parvaneh is not the colonel’s only deceased child. Two of his sons have also fallen, one during the 1979 revolution and another during the Iraq war. Two of his children are still alive, though not much better off. His eldest son, Amir, has suffered a mental breakdown after serving time in prison, a victim of the Shah’s regime; his other daughter, Farzaneh, is married to an unprincipled man who makes his way by standing behind those in power at any given moment, regardless of the ideology that props up that power.

The fates of the colonel’s children result from his actions as both an officer in the Shah’s army and as a father and husband. Dowlatabadi’s nuanced treatment of his characters permits readers to understand and empathize with their choices, though they hardly understand one another, or see the world in the same ways. This is due in great part to the colonel, a man who considers himself an independent thinker, but is also beholden to cultural traditions, so much so that he eviscerated his adulterous wife.

For all of the death contained in the book, the only one to appear on the page is this murder, for which the colonel spends time in the same prison as Amir. But death is not the story. The dead are the lucky ones, freed from the burdens of history. Life in Iran today, as Dowlatabadi makes all too clear, spares no one. He performs an autopsy on Iranian national identity, ravaged by generations of war and conflict, which can be made “responsible for anything, except for the lives of the people caught up in it.” There is not a single victor in the novel and this fact brings into harsh focus the cultural complexity that plagues Iran and Iranians.

Because outside influences, working overtly and covertly to push their agendas, shaped Iran’s 20th century, the plight of the colonel and his family mirrors that of the entire nation, baited and divided by false promises for which men and women made ultimate sacrifices and suffered countless humiliations “only to discover that the truth they have found is nothing but specious doctrine and bogus ideology.”

As a soldier, the colonel was also one of these dutiful followers, until his core belief in Persian history led him to disobey an order to fight for the British and instilled in his children the pride of living by your own code. But the contortions of Iranian history leave no individual free from group influence and so the colonel’s children disband in the name of their individual beliefs, joining competing factions, leaving the colonel with nothing to do but watch it all happen, knowing they are as helpless as him.

Through the colonel filters the confusion and contradictions that menace Iranians, but it is Amir who offers some of the most acute insight. Knowing his siblings’ fates, freighted with the belief that his own actions somehow abetted their downfalls, he lives a self-imposed exile in the basement of the family home. As the political tides once again shift, Khezr, a man who interrogated and tortured Amir, appears. He spends a night in Amir’s room, eating the family’s food, drinking their arack. Amir posits that his situation is a result of his “lack of certainty about anything.”

The disorienting shifts in perspective utilized by Dowlatabadi do take some getting used to, but this is of course intentional. Foreign influences and interests have merged with and co-opted thousands of years of tradition in Iran and what has at times been a faction’s weakness later becomes its strength, or least the fulcrum used to leverage control of the national dialogue. Steeped in historical references and crafted with a degree of heightened realism that comes off like a documentary, The Colonel offers a portrait of a nation that has grappled with the same problems for so long without being able to remedy them. As outsiders looking in, we can never comprehend fully this reality. But, as an insider who has remained in Iran through these tumultuous decades, been imprisoned and censured while recognized widely as Iran’s greatest novelist, Dowlatabadi’s message leaves no doubt that the greatest victim is an Iran that continues to incubate these problematic relationships.

As Amir tells Farzaneh: “The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all alienated, strangers in our own land. It’s tragic. The odd thing is that we have never got used to it.”

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In Farther Away, the linkage between Wallace and Franzen is not merely suggested but rather invited, and Franzen’s collection opens a door to the gearbox of his own mind’s attempt to reorder itself around the death of his friend — not just Infinite Jest’s David Foster Wallace, but Dave, the man whose ashes Franzen scatters from a small book of matches in the essay “Selkirk” and the central figure of a touching reflection (“David Foster Wallace”) on the late writer’s ultimate decline. We find out that the tragically funny prose Wallace spun in Infinite Jest was not just for us — “Those sentences and those pages, when he was able to be producing them, were as true and safe and happy a home as any he had during most of the twenty years I knew him” — and that when he could no longer find solace there, “the disease killed the man as surely as cancer might have.”

Farther Away opens with Franzen’s 2011 commencement speech at Kenyon College (“Pain Won’t Kill You”), where Wallace delivered his own address (later released as This is Water) in 2005. Similar themes echo in the two speeches — the assault of techno-consumerism on the pliable mind, for example, and the necessity of “putting yourself in real relation to real people…that you might end up loving.” Franzen focuses the lens ever-more inward, however, and highlights the dangers posed by a culture of individuals hyper-focused on themselves and conditioned by a level of social networking that was unimaginable in 2005: “To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors,” he says.

The omnipresent banalities of the smartphone era stoke Franzen’s preoccupation with the ego-centrism of contemporary life. In the scathing “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” he cringes at the forever-nearby din of that which he would prefer not to hear even from a distance — “The cellular component of my irritation is straightforward. I simply do not, while buying socks at the Gap, or standing in a ticket line and pursuing my private thoughts, or trying to read a novel on a plane that’s being boarded, want to be imaginatively drawn into the sticky world of some nearby human being’s home life.” The cell phone, he argues, “has done lasting harm of real social significance,” having replaced the cigarettes of earlier decades as the delivery mechanism of the “suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority.” Franzen, with a measure of irony, bemoans the ubiquity of “I love you!” via cell phone in public spaces (particularly after 9/11) because “the person seems to be saying to me and to everyone else present: ‘My emotions and my family [his emphasis] are more important to me than your social comfort.’”

But if there is any respite from his day-to-day troubles, it certainly comes in the form of watching, cataloguing, and advocating for the preservation of rare birds. “When I go looking for a new bird species,” Franzen says, “I’m searching for a mostly lost authenticity, for the remnants of a world now largely overrun by human beings but still beautifully indifferent to us; to glimpse a rare bird somehow persisting in its life of breeding and feeding is an enduringly transcendent delight” (“Farther Away”).

In perhaps the best essay of the lot, “The Ugly Mediterranean,” Franzen chronicles his travels through Cyprus, Malta, and Italy and renders with surprising even-handedness the duality of the societal forces that contribute to regular trapping, hunting, and consumption of migratory songbirds. While in Cyprus, during an excursion to liberate birds stuck in home-rigged snares, he and his compatriots receive blows at the hands of local trappers, themselves impassioned to preserve a cultural (and economic) imperative. The essay is peppered with species of birds Franzen can casually name at sight — not with the cool, detached interest of a scientist but rather with the ardor of someone who would (and has) risked blows from a baseball bat for the sake of rescuing just one more object of his affection.

Another joy for Franzen is in contemplation of Serious Fiction. “Can a better kind of fiction save the world?” he asks (“What Makes You So …”). “There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul.” Although his musings on selected pieces are likely more accessible for those who have read the works in question, each essay serves equally well as a window into where Franzen draws the line between Serious Fiction and…everything else. In “The Corn King,” a review of The Hundred Brothers, Franzen extols Donald Antrim as an author whose singular work “speaks like none of us for all of us…because we all inescapably feel ourselves to be the special center of our private worlds.” He reaches back to Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler for a discourse on materialism, nihilism, and “the impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever” (pausing along the way to mention Wallace once again). Franzen even turns pragmatic, advising other writers to avoid the use of “Comma-Then” should they wish to avoid churning out “fiction-workshop English.”

Ultimately, Farther Away is a meditation on the obscure other half of a world right in front of our faces — the private horror of a public figure struggling with depression, the unspoken loneliness of an individual living in a world of people perpetually turned off because their devices are turned on, the perils of a bird in flight, and cherished pages of well-written fiction that enable us “to embrace, even celebrate, the dark fact that an individual’s life consists, finally, of an accelerating march toward decay and death.” Franzen brings the reader close (uncomfortably, at times) to facets of life not usually examined, and it becomes clear that he is not just talking about songbirds when he writes, “It felt wrong to be seeing at such close range a species that ordinarily requires careful work with binoculars to get a decent view.” Not every piece soars, but none fails to get off the ground, and as Franzen notes in his essay on Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, “…it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you.”

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Imagine that Mark Twain had taken four volumes and 3,307 pages to get to the turning point in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Huck and Jim get lost in the fog at Cairo, Ill., where the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers meet. Imagine that at the end of that fourth volume, you still didn’t know whether their raft had drifted east along the Ohio River toward the free states or been carried southward down the Mississippi River and into the heart of American darkness. Now, imagine that those 3,307 pages, despite some slow bits, contained some of the most riveting reading of your life, and that you knew — knew in your bones — that Huck and Jim were headed south, and you lived in quiet dread that Mark Twain, now quite elderly, would die before he could finish the tale.

That would put you roughly in the position of a devoted reader of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, the fourth volume of which, The Passage of Power, arrives this week, just in time for Father’s Day. The Passage of Power ends in the summer of 1964, seven months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but before Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, before most of the legislation that created The Great Society, before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that deepened America’s involvement in Vietnam and eventually destroyed the Johnson Presidency. In other words, the four volumes now in print, which have already earned Caro a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, along with virtually every other prize offered for books of history, merely form the prologue to the great American political tragedy that is the Johnson Presidency.

But what a prologue. These books are epically, at times even comically, overlong, and yet they are also, quite literally, epic in ambition and achievement. Caro is clearly trying to write the epic poem of The American Century, with tall, jug-eared, foul-mouthed LBJ as his flawed tragic hero. It is hard to believe that Caro will finish the last four and a half years of Johnson’s presidency in a single volume, as he has said he will, and I dread the hours it will take me to read the 1,500 pages or so I imagine it will take him to cover the subject, but I also fear that the American world I came of age in will never fully make sense to me unless Caro, now 76, lives long enough to finish his Life of Johnson.

The unifying theme of the Johnson biography, and of The Power Broker, Caro’s equally overlong, and equally brilliant biography of New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, is political power and its uses. In the prologue to The Passage of Power, Caro writes:

[A]lthough the cliché says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said, but what is equally true, is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary… But as a man obtains more power, camouflage is less necessary. The curtain begins to rise. The revealing begins.

As the curtain rises on this volume, Johnson is poised to trick himself out of the prize around which he has built his entire career. As the 1950s came to a close, Johnson was, as a ruthlessly effective majority leader of the U.S. Senate, arguably the second most powerful man in America, but after waiting too long to declare his candidacy for president in 1960, Johnson was outflanked by JFK and ended up as vice president. Johnson’s tenure in the Kennedy White House was made all the more humiliating by the fact that Kennedy’s aides, including his younger brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, despised him, mercilessly ridiculing the Texas-born LBJ as “Rufus Cornpone” and keeping him out of meetings where the real political decisions were being made.

This section of The Passage of Power, funny as it sometimes can be in depicting Johnson trying to toady his way into Kennedy’s esteem, is slack and wayward. Whenever things get slow in Johnson’s life, Caro has the unfortunate habit of changing the subject, offering potted histories of the other people and institutions around his central character. While the long digressions into the Kennedy family and the roots of the blood feud between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy in this volume are vastly more engrossing than the ponderous hundred-page history of the U.S. Senate that clogs the absurdly overstuffed third volume, Master of the Senate, these sideshows still feel like throat-clearing, especially compared to the second half of the book that begins with crack of the rifle that fells President Kennedy in Dallas.

Each of the four volumes has its set piece, a dramatic moment that Caro uses to turn the usually dry topic of history into a riveting page-turner, and here that set piece is Thanksgiving Week of 1963, which began with the Kennedy assassination. November 22, 1963, is surely the most exhaustively examined day in all of American history, and yet Caro manages to make it seem new by telling the story of the assassination from the point of view of the man it most directly affected, Vice President Johnson.

In the months leading up to the assassination, Caro reminds us, Johnson was increasingly worried that Kennedy might drop him from the ticket in 1964, and, on the very morning Kennedy landed in Dallas, editors at Life magazine met to discuss their investigation of Johnson aide Bobby Baker’s peddling of political favors, which was quickly morphing into an investigation of Johnson’s questionable financial dealings. Had Lee Harvey Oswald missed, it is altogether possible that the Baker scandal, along with Johnson’s dwindling political influence, could have pushed Kennedy to pick a new vice president, rendering Johnson little more than a colorful footnote to history.

But Oswald, and whoever else may or may not have been crouching in the Grassy Knoll, had deadly aim, and, in that instant, provided the hinge that separated the first half of the American Century from its darker, less glorious second half. For nearly an hour after the first shots rang out, as rumors swirled of a possible Soviet-led coup d’etat, Johnson was held out of sight in a small cubicle in Parkland Hospital where doctors were trying to revive the fallen president, until Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell walked in, his face stricken, and said, “He’s gone,” two words that transformed Johnson from a political has-been into the leader of the free world.

Caro considers the next seven months, from the hectic Thanksgiving Week transition, in which a cool, calm President Johnson managed a flawless transition of power while the nation mourned, to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, which put an end to a century of legalized segregation, as Johnson’s “finest moment…a moment not only masterful, but, in its way, heroic.” The LBJ the reader has come to know in the previous 3,000 pages is a schemer and a bully, who lives for crushing those less powerful than himself, abusing his staff, publicly humiliating fellow politicians and government officials, and always carving up the spoils, political and financial, for his own benefit. “Yet for a period of time,” Caro writes, “a brief but crucial moment in history, he had held these elements [of his personality] in check, had overcome them, had, in a way, conquered himself.”

Sadly, it was to be a short-lived victory. “Power reveals,” Caro argues, and in The Passage of Power, he demonstrates precisely what this means. One comes away thinking that for a man like Johnson, with his exquisite antenna for the finest gradations of power, the chaotic post-assassination White House was a perfect atmosphere for his particular talents. On November 21, 1963, LBJ was still “Rufus Cornpone,” a big, funny-looking caricature of a Beltway pol, largely unknown to the average American, corrupt to the core, and fast slipping from power. Seven months later, he had passed a landmark civil rights bill, which Caro convincingly argues went far beyond anything Kennedy could have achieved, and was cruising toward one of the most lopsided presidential victories in history.

Johnson accomplished this by shielding himself behind the country’s almost mystical sense of the promise of the fallen president, leveraging his very powerlessness as a usurper to the throne into absolute power. Once he won the presidency in his own right in 1964, his ego returned, and all his great achievements for the poor and powerless of this country — Medicare, voting rights, Head Start — were undone by his unquenchable thirst for power and his ham-fisted approach to the war in Vietnam.

Robert Caro, one senses, has a bit of an ego on him, too, and it is a shame for those of us who love his books that he has not found an editor able to stand up to him after the near perfection of the first two volumes of this series. Master of the Senate is too long by at least a third, and this new volume, though less egregiously long-winded, nevertheless could do with a judicious edit. But while I might be able to imagine cutting hundreds of pages from these books, I cannot think of another living historian who could have written any of the pages that remain. As we learn from studying Lyndon Johnson, we have to take our geniuses as they are, warts and all.

Image Credit: Bill Morris/billmorris52@gmail.com

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