Catherine Bush's Accusation

Novels and non-fictive explorations about Western professionals challenged by shifting their work overseas have a long and (in tone) varied history. John Hersey’s Hiroshima is a dispassionate recording of a horrific event; Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is a semi-hallucinatory novel about an archaeologist’s efforts at exhuming a victim of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war; and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is a hilarious account of a journalist’s misadventures which proves the Peter Principle. In these, and other, novels, the exotic locale acts as metaphysical challenge to the protagonist (the challenge in the first book above is specifically for the reader).

Like Scoop, Catherine Bush’s 2013 Accusation is a novel about a journalist at sea in an alien world of fact or fiction. Though Waugh’s novel’s protagonist was also based on a reporter in Addis Ababa (Bush’s protagonist travels to that city, as well), the similarities between the two books end there.

Bush’s narrator comes in contact with a charismatic and forceful black man who founded and managed a boys’ and girls’ circus company. Sara is drawn into sympathetic curiosity with this man (Raymond) when she finds out he’s been accused of abusing his young charges. The impetus, the reason for the sympathy? Sara, herself, had once been falsely accused, and charged (the case was dropped for lack of evidence), with stealing a woman’s wallet and running up some purchases, so she understands that the accusation will never be fully expunged in the minds of many, whatever the outcome of any trial.

This is a fine working plot for all kinds of reasons and avenues: the reactions and withdrawal of friends and lovers (Bush handles this with intelligence and conviction); the mining for clues and objective detail (Bush is exhaustive in the book’s best scenes, the middle-section questioning in Addis Ababa); and the acceptance or difficulty that one will never know the full details (Bush explores this from different angles, and though it ties in well with the Sara-David sub-plot, the grim persistence of the psychological reorientation overwhelms other possible moods and viewpoints).

It’s on this latter tendency, the main theme obsession, that the novel falters. Like her novel Claire’s Head, Bush is excellent at getting inside the ... er, head of the protagonist. But, though that metaphor is somewhat different in Accusation (the different locations, the many characters, the competing viewpoints and desires), Sara still suffocates the reader by not only appearing in most every scene, but by being every scene’s overwhelming conscience. A counter argument would consider that getting into others’ heads could have destroyed the factual mystery (Raymond – did he or didn’t he?), but the Canadian characters also in the dark (friend Juliet, lover David, as well as Sara’s newspaper boss) could have been offered sole-viewpoint scenes, and some of the Ethiopian characters, and Australian Sem Le, could have added layers to the confusion and emotion by offering us their unfiltered thoughts. The first-person voice could have been a better way to deal with the dominant perspective.

That major complaint aside, Accusation is narratively interesting, even thrilling in some places, especially in its final two-thirds, as well as patiently wise in its assessments.

As an addendum, the missing dialogue tags sometimes hindered my reading experience. I always understood who was speaking, it’s just that I had to halt on more than one occasion, which is fine if that’s part of the intent –  William Gaddis comes to mind – but not so fine if it detracts from the narrative pace.

Alexander Kuprin's The Duel

The title gives away the inevitable climax, but Alexander Kuprin’s concern in The Duel is to hook a common Russian melodramatic trope with his own spin, in this novel the absurdity of initial event and build-up, before the set-to itself. Military life, of which Kuprin got a taste, is skewered with existentialist mockery, realism’s magnifying glass, and a lacerating Romantic irony. Reminiscent of any Dostoyevsky femme fatale, Kuprin’s Shurochka, by theatrical and duplicitous direction, adds gasoline to the fire of Romashov’s ridiculous, impetuous pride.

Unfortunately, Kuprin’s powerful narration is compromised by translator Josh Billings’ repetitive word choices and rhythmic missteps, even though he captures a good deal of Kuprin’s lively characterizations and lyrical transitions. But by far the biggest problem in this English version of The Duel stems from Melville House Publishing’s rotten care in setting the text, which is riddled with typos (at least one per page in a 306 pp outlay). Kuprin deserved much better, and I note in mild horror that the same publisher/translator duo combined for a Pushkin collection.

Jim Johnstone’s Dog Ear

With its mix of scientific observation and metaphysical questioning, Jim Johnstone’s latest poetry collection, Dog Ear, recalls similar procedures in the poetry of Leigh Kotsilidis. Whereas Kotsilidis accepts the incompletions inherent in fact and fancy, equably so, Johnstone’s speculative conclusions are anguished, the product of a mind obsessive enough to follow the circuitous and repetitive paths of logic, but intelligent enough to know its not likely to offer more than provisional understanding. The titular opener displays this frustrated investigation:

It was years before I learned to call
this prayer: the right-hand corner
of a page turned down to make another
page. I attempted to escape, then return
to the boneyard where I’d removed
an earring from my wife’s right ear—
diamond, the crux of the universe,
contracting to leave a pin-sized hole
midair. In that margin, my words
remain transfixed until she disappears—
proof that while I swore the world
I’d created would double like a hand
beneath my own, it merely stretches
before me in consolation. There, there.

“Dog Ear” also demonstrates Johnstone’s – I want to call it ‘facility’, but that’s not the right word – strange blend of anecdote, metaphor, and fantasy. In isolation, those components don’t provide a vehicle for even provisional understanding, but a readerly  juggling act conjures an organic unfolding, climax, and denouement, classic structures that, in Johnstone’s effort, muddies and perplexes, while closing on an anti-epiphany, the final two-word repetition either compassionate or maliciously diverting.

The metaphysical questing is a constant throughout the collection, and an obsessive trope that supports it is flying/falling. In “Complementarity” (“All that’s lost is given shape -- /a hand crushed under Boeing/fuselage”), in “Inland” (“our company’s shade/lifts likeness from stands of birch, blots/retreating lanes of wind: our pilot”), in “Evel Knievel Negotiates the Fountain at Caesar’s Palace” (I groped around and found myself/unmoored at latitude”), and in “Ariadne’s Thread” (“Our pact: to climb against  winter’s rush --/mad, uncoupled”), the narrator is caught in a tragic fix: wise enough to know of gravity’s inviolable law, but restless enough to want to transcend it anyway, however knowingly futile the attempt. In this, Johnstone’s dilemma (acceptance of entropy vs  spiritual desire for transcendence mated with its infinitesimally small likelihood of  realization) can only be recorded and aesthetically investigated, if not unified.

The biggest weakness of this volume is Johnstone’s over-reliance on the high-toned, even vatic, register. The poems are good enough – and some of them are more than good – so that the tone doesn’t create an unfortunate parody of itself, and I also realize that  existential burrowing isn’t an avocation, but an occasional self-puncturing (“Evel Knievel” ’s “body tossed ass-first/over the gas tank’s hive” a stick-out exception) would be more than welcome.

H. L. Mencken's A Choice of Days

What do H. L. Mencken, Kahlil Gibran, and Thomas Jefferson have in common? Many can ape a starred quote from all three, but few bother to read them extensively. In Mencken’s case, that means an unmeasured adulation for his incisive, provocative, oft-cited epigrams. Mencken plied his chief trade – newspaper opinion pieces – during the beginnings of yellow journalism and working class exposés, so it’s ironic that he succeeded in an era that alternately pandered to, and sympathized with, the semi-literate. (More on that in a bit.) He knew, or wrote at the same time as, Hemingway, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair. Nathanael West also clicked keys in a newspaper office (and readers are grateful – the excellent Miss Lonelyhearts resulted). Great writing, bold opinion, larger than life personalities. Mencken, like the notables listed above, also applied himself to the creative arts, as they’re more widely pegged, though he shelved stories and poems as inferior testings. That’s an important segue into the review at hand.

I didn’t like Mencken’s A Choice of Words, the abridged book of his three-volume autobiography-in-essays. I didn’t like it because I didn’t like the man. In a creative work, that kind of identification of quality with the person who penned it is inexcusable. In a journalistic piece, much less so. Non-fiction reportage – dispassion, wide-focus assertion, external issues, definition by negative reaction – often runs counter to creative endeavour, so it’s doubly impressive the aforementioned novelists transcended those strictures. I picked up this book to see if Mencken would rip off his starched collar, ply himself with a whiskey or three (a semi-teetotaler, he prided himself on working sober), and get personal. Be personable. Vulnerable. Endearing. Investigative, in the deepest sense of the word. No such luck. Mencken’s views are weightless because I didn’t know what animated them, other than aristocratic derision. Southerners or rednecks (or as Mencken liked to call them, “lintheads”) are despised above all other targets, even politicians and religious figures, because the former created the cynical crusading of the latter two groups. Stupidity is Mencken’s constant subject, either in direct attack or underlying core. Many or most of us remember his awesome epigram, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”, but Mencken’s good times are frequently spurred on by mockery, by reactive self-regard.

A Choice of Words brings that out. Mencken’s style is breezily confident, his diction far-ranging and entertaining, and his sentence structures various and tonally even, though every second explanatory clause begins with the jarringly formal “for”, as in, “[They] appear[ed] to have leaned toward Levirate ideas, for when the cousin dies one of his brothers married his widow”. But the emotion – and in what better an avenue than autobiography to explore it? – is stillborn. Lots of bravado (childhood indiscretions) and faux-wonder (condescending observations of “coloureds”, and rabble-rousing drunks), but all of it viewed through a telescope on a cold and sparse-starred night. Even the most traumatic event – the great Baltimore fire of 1904 – is rendered as hectic report. I half-expected Mencken to sign off for a commercial break during problems with burned-out news offices and shifting locales. No ruminations on lives lost, homes and careers destroyed, specific damage, dynamic images. In fact, no acknowledgement that these were issues at all. But Mencken the hero (getting the “news” out no matter the obstacle) carries the day. After recently reading Orhan Pamuk’s beautifully moving, wise, and multi-angled two essays on living through earthquakes in Istanbul, Mencken’s puny offerings are an offensive wasteland of the imagination, strong on the headlines but flatlined on the heart beneath them.

Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian

Much better than his Marks of Identity (as translated by Rabassa), Juan Goytisolo’s Count Julian, the 1970 middle novel in the trilogy, gains that evaluation in no small part from Helen Lane’s fine, lyrical translation. The rhetoric is rhythmically calibrated for emotional shock, metaphorically daring (repetitive insect predation is handled with skillful variation and merciless scientific observation), and tonally sensitive and various. Most importantly, the voice which seemed, at times in the opening novel, pedantic and general, here is sharper. The reader can hear echoes of a necessary rage and mockery. Relentless in its targetted hits, Goytisolo avoids the flippant drive-by which often marred Marks of Identity to first colour his characters with specific tics and twitches in order to more effectively drive juice through the electric chair’s occupied head-and-hand irons. But, though it’s shorter than its predecessor, the pace also fries the reader’s sensibilities just past the half-way point. I’ll be reporting on the concluding book, Juan the Landless, later this year since it’s also translated by Lane.

Juan Goytisolo's Marks of Identity

Works in translation often present acute reviewer-with-pants-down syndrome because that blind and deaf soul can’t rely on the middlepersonhood as a faithful conduit due to the reviewer’s unrefulgent ability in understanding the source work. That problem popped up as often as moles in a whack- ‘em arcade game throughout Gregory Rabassa’s Spanish translation of Juan Goytisolo’s 1966 Marks of Identity, the novelist’s first entry (and first-ever avant work) in his lauded trilogy. Repetitively clunky syntax shifts the reader’s focus from content and image to its unrhythmic means, a dire flaw in an ambitious, multi-modal, complex work where rhetoric registers from passionate denunciation to cool irony. The reader remains tentative on an evaluation since the blunder could emanate as much, or more, from the author, in this instance. Certainly, Goytisolo doesn’t make the interpreter’s job easy. One of the main approaches – the second-person autobiographical punctuationless highly-charged run-on sentence block-paragraphs – creates a heavy slog no matter the translator’s talents, as evidenced by the circling back, the lost referents, the cloudy tones, the mysterious pronouns, the sketchy characterizations. Perhaps and again, this is Goytisolo’s intent – the destruction of bourgeois expectations – because a giant ‘fuck you’ to the reader wouldn’t come as a surprise next to the giant ‘fuck you’ to Franco, Franco’s supporters and minions, communists, fat women, dull workers of state whether in bureaucratic office or on production line, ridiculous Don Juans, haughty and decadent forebears of the aristocracy, the Catholic church, the myth of the honourable virgin, the myth of the heroic knight, Spanish stoicism, tourists, Catalonian complacency, counter-revolutionary simple-Simons, familial imbecility, sexual repression, deceptive ‘friends’, literary log rolling, pop culture, romanticizing traditional Spanish culture, technological ‘progress’, sexual duplicity, sentimentality, the police, democrats, the self, and – above all – the pimping-out of language as moral directive. That doesn’t leave a lot of space for an opposing, positive vision in Goytisolo’s personal revolution other than (in the vaguest of terms) freedom, and (ironically) a romantic call-to-arms for Moorish re-engagement and takeover of moribund Castilian society. If I give this book a plug, it’s more to do with Goytisolo’s audaciousness than a realized (structurally, aesthetically) fictional journey.

Best Books Read in 2014

Yet another change-up on the year-end retrospective, this time listing every book (with brief commentary) I liked this calendar year. I can't remember better luck in my reading choices. Maybe twenty or twenty-five mild-to-outright duds and flubs, which means an above-50% plug rate. That said, I shelved several only a chapter (or a few poems) in, so, in hindsight, it allowed for far more quality. I've been sliding in that direction for several years now, anyway, and as the years accelerate into worldwide graphomania, it's a damn good policy.

The first ten books are listed in order of preference, the other twenty-seven in no particular order. The [b] designation after publication date refers to a lengthier blog entry on the same book earlier in the year, which can be accessed at the sidebar to the right.

1) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, (1973). I don’t know why it’s taken me forty-one years to pick up this wayward, psychedelic, manic encyclopedia. The best “new” novel I’ve read this century, its scope and tonal range, lexical extravagance and meaning (reading some of the dismissive reviews on its meaning was discouraging), and prophetic impulse is incomparable. From a trapped bombing victim on one page to the surrealistic trip of a buggered bar patron trying to fish out his mouth harp from an overflowing toilet on the next page, it all works, all 760 dense pages of it.

2) Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers, (1997). Over forty years in the making, Ozick’s novel is executed in all facets with a hyper-attached Swiss Army knife. Stylish, lean, big-voiced with an incredibly sophisticated tone both arch and solemn, a fantasia without taking away from the realistic and harrowing penultimate event, wise, metaphysically daunting, meta-fictionally ingenious, structurally and chronologically inventive, funny, funny, and funny. The titular character I won’t ever forget.

3) Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760). Even Sterne wouldn’t have anticipated the irony and hypocrisy of present-day pomos carping about the too-earnest and too-proud certainties of realists and other assorted traditionalists while, themselves, lathering on the arcane and the obscuring, the specialized hush and the snake-eating-its-tail argumentation. I read this novel (or anti-novel) in my youth, but it’s only this year, this reread, that I’ve appreciated it as more than an amusing, infinite digression. (The targets are broader, of course, including other pompous figures, whether in the eighteenth or twenty-first centuries.)

4) James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (1996). With the help of a skylight winch, pulled this from a Victoria, B.C. bookstore in 2007, and it took me seven years of daily weight training to be able to hoist the cement coffin from a bookcase addition. Amazingly meticulous research – not dissimilar in kind, at least, to the work Brian Busby put in on another bio on this list, while separating truth from whopper – in order to get underneath the many layers of fibbing and “image maintenance” of Kosinski’s mercurial personality. The Polish history is fascinating, the involvement with a New York literary elite desperate for “authenticity” revealing, the Hollywood hobnobbing a converging and sympathetic ambivalence, the Village Voice exposé a balanced journalistic overview with riveting biographical detail. Kiki von Fraunhofer must be the most selfless lit-spouse of all.

5) Joseph Heller, Something Happened, (1974). Relentlessly dark, the novel is black and yellow bile served up dry. Heller, after Catch-22, brings the American nightmare home. If there’s a more illuminating floodlight turned on office politics, I haven’t yet read it. The home front gets a similarly detailed psychological exploration. (I seem to have chanced upon quite a few laugh-to-keep-from-crying works this year.)

 

6) Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book Of Words, tr. Susan Bernofsky, (2004). Impressionistic yet concentrated, the novel gathers force and leaves stunning metaphorical clues as the girl narrator tries to understand her mysterious guardian’s language-perversion in justification of a career in state torture. Mixing folklore with horrific event, the reader, too, is constantly unbalanced. 

 

7) Anis Shivani, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, (2012). [b]. In a wide range of modes and emotions, Shivani argues with, and touts, an equally wide range of literary lion(esse)s, artists, and political figures, while situating (or implicating) them in cultural clashes and irrelevancies. Many standout poems.

8) Peter Richardson, Bit Parts For Fools, (2013). Richardson deepens his historical fiction monologues in this latest poetry collection, but never runs away from more personal involvement, revealing new concerns in entries of retirement, nostalgia, and specific appreciation. (As a huge Ralph Gustafson fan, it’s heartening to see the corresponding gentle elegy.)

9) Rachel Lebowitz, Cottonopolis, (2013). Shelby Foote complained about most historians whose dry and/or poorly-written tomes detracted from the horrors evoked in source material. Not so in Lebowitz’ stirring poems – found, phrase-borrowed, or original – of the too-easily-forgotten slaves, weaver-slaves, and famine victims of the Industrial maladaptation. Mixing extracts of squalor and beauty in language both vivid and blunt, the book is a worthy reminder that history tends, unfortunately, to favour stories of superhuman battle rather than the more common (and relatable) long emergencies detailed here – even during the American Civil War – of  infection, exhaustion, and disease.

10) Yiyun Li, The Vagrants, (2009). Set in the late 1970s, between Mao’s Cultural Devolution and the ‘Eight Square’ Massacre of 1989 (I use one of the euphemisms to bypass Chinese censors in that country on the slight chance someone there googles this mini-review), Li’s consistently low-key, formal, dire novel records the cultural ambivalences of that brief and hopeful period, when generations clashed over the value of individualism and revolution over respect, collective will, and family obedience. 

 

John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, (1970). A delightful Henry Miller-ish creative non-fic place piece, without the inflated metaphysics.

ed. Brian Busby, The Heart Accepts It All, (2013). A wide-ranging selection of John Glassco’s letters which, in their personal obsessions, reveal, perplex, and delight.

ed. Brian Busby, A Gentleman of Pleasure, (2011). [b]. Meticulous biographical research against a complex historical adventure which organizes a psychological study of  dramatic, wise import.

Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden, (2010). [b]. Grim novella, rich in character tension, not so rich in tonal contrast.

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland, (1990). [b]. Has been called Pynchon’s worst novel. We should all be so lucky. A delightfully paranoid California romp. The author gently slaps the counter-culture while throwing vitriol at apostate informers.

James Dickey, Deliverance, (1970). [b]. Exceptionally tense, with gorgeous rock-cut sentence-descriptions of the river rapids. Dickey doesn’t let up in the quieter character assessments, either.

Bill Gaston, The Order of Good Cheer, (2008). [b]. A colourful bisection where the comparisons are effective only at a stretch. The alternating stories, though, provide a potent one-two combo of whimsy and guilt.

Mona Simpson, Off Keck Road, (2000). It must be hard to compose a novella about three unadventurous women, but Simpson succeeds with interior shading, wise character exchanges, and descriptive subtlety.

Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure, (1989). Bainbridge’s last semi-autobiographical novel (I believe), the writing is superb: dialogue captures working-class vitality, and narration is crisp and colourful. Humour with a cost.

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow, (2010) [b]. A generous dose of typically surprising, astute, comedic Amis-penned mischief.

John Pass, Crawlspace, (2011). [b]. A pretty good poetry collection with vibrant images, disarming humour, and narrative heft. Flagged a bit with emotional overreach.

Dean Young, Embryoyo, (2007). [b]. Excellent surrealistic poetry assault. Provocative linkages which gather multiple suggestions.

Nicole Dixon, High-Water Mark, (2012). The transience of desire, and desire’s reconciliation, usually for the best, characterize many of Dixon’s dialogue-heavy short stories. The traps gnawing at each character stem not so much from grim economic realities or family pressures, but from individuals’ own limitations, largely based on a lack of experience (many characters are young). Pared, immediate, and refreshingly clear of taking sides.

Philip Roth, Indignation, (2008). [b]. I’ve soured a bit on this since reading/blogging it in February, but it still packs a typical Rothian punch of sexuality and identity at near-burst the entire novella.

Alissa Nutting, Tampa, (2013). [b]. Receiving a horrendously reactive critical reception, either for or against, because of its explosive subject matter, the novel isn’t cutting edge or exploitative trash, but a flawed, intelligent first-person study of sex and power.

Will Ferguson, Spanish Fly, (2007). Riveting account of scammers set in the U.S. Depression dustbowl, the novel scores frequent points for humour, drama, plot, and description. The ending fell apart – in believability and force – but that’s a minor point.

Jason Guriel, The Pigheaded Soul, (2013). [b]. A wide tapas table of literary response to a fairly divergent set of authors in several genres, Guriel’s writing is concise and occasionally startling in its phrase-making and wise allusive reach, though I disagree with many of its evaluations.

Shane Neilson, Will, (2013). [b]. In-your-face and angry, sadly contemplative, or japingly satirical, Neilson, in these short stories, succeeds in a variety of tones. Too many noteworthy stories to single out just one or two. They’re all various shades of interesting to exciting.

 

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, (2005). Whimsical, witty, poignant novel of a reclusive poet battling inertia and failure to craft an intro to a poetry anthology. Baker overcomes the potentially dry material by releasing a captivating voice in the narrator.

Martin Amis, Heavy Water & Other Stories, (1999). Much panned and, yeah, some of the inverted conceits (and conceited inverts) are more interesting for the idea than the exposition, but several of the shorts have the stamp of Amis-branded absurdity and bullseye satire. Unlike almost every reviewer, I found the title effort both vivid and moving.

Jerzy Kosinski, Passion Play, (1979). The quality of Kosinski’s opus flags markedly after his first two fiction titles, but there are many haunting passages here of identity crisis and ambivalent nostalgia, as well as stinging descriptions of polo drama and Caribbean intrigue.

Guy de Maupassant, Selected Stories, tr. Roger Colet, (compiled 1971). A much-culled selection of Maupassant’s short stories, including “The Horla” and “Boule de Suif”, Colet’s translation is classically rendered, though dialogue has the force and immediacy of the characters’ volatility.

Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors, (2007). A slew of essays, articles, reminiscences, polemics, literary statements, anecdotes, historical cut-outs, and author retrospectives, capped by his Nobel speech, Paris interview and an original short story, Pamuk’s range is impressive, though that scope is contradicted, at times – I carp – by his obsession with East-West relations.

Zachariah Wells, Career Limiting Moves, (2013). I’d read most of these poetry reviews and essays, interviews, considerations, and ironic interrogations, but not his excellent review – “Disaster Tourism” – of Anne Simpson’s Loop, which he once pointed me to, after I’d reviewed her atrocious collection, Is, (available at the roll call to the right). Lots of quotation included throughout the collection, and assertions are elaborated on from more than one angle.

Richard Greene, Dante’s House, (2014). [b]. The long terza rima titular poem is a standout, neither sagging nor garrulous. Several gems appear in the opening section, too, including the simultaneously gripping and measured “The Idea of Order at Port-au-Prince”.

George Elliott Clarke, Black, (2012). [b]. In a stunningly wide array of moods and modes, Clarke’s characteristic indulgences are superseded by a wealth of lyrical power.

Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, (2011). Wallowing in cultural ephemera, this short story collection is nevertheless saved by Gartner’s (narrative, lexical, stylish) joyous invention.