What's up for 2012?

Books I haven't managed to write about yet include Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, a book I was pleased to have read in the past few months, and found to be everything. I hope to follow this up with his last collection (I think), Apricot Jam and Other Stories. In November, I read The Art of Fielding, a first novel by Chad Harbach. Zen and baseball ... how can you go wrong? Set on the campus of Westish College, which is situated in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin, Harbach's novel is about mindlessness and mindfulness, the varieties and complexities of male relationships, the complexities of relationships, and a great and enjoyable read.

I'm looking forward to revisiting a favorite novel and reading new novels by favorite authors. I recently learned that Dean Bakopoulos is teaching at Grinnell College. I read his 2005 novel, Please Don't Come Back to the Moon when it first came out and it has stayed with me all of these years. I just received it and his newest novel My American Unhappiness as Christimas presents. They are both at the top of my list. I am also looking forward to Ha Jin's new novel, Nanjing Requieum, and David Guterson's new novel Ed King. Ann Patchett has  a newish novel, State of Wonder, as does Umberto Eco. Jonathan Lethem and Stanley Fish both have collections of essays to be explored, and I'm thinking of dipping into Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy, Peter Ackroyd's London Under, Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, and R. Zamora Linmark's Leche.

Sounds like a happy New Year. Let the Favorite Books and Book Review know what you're going to be reading in 2012.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.

R. Stuhr

As a Pulitzer Prize winner (and a "national best seller"), this is an already much written about book. In October, I heard Jennifer Egan read a chapter from this novel at the Free Library of Philadelphia. One of the qualities she talked about was the way each chapter shifts focus to talk about a character who appeared in a minor role in another chapter. At the time I was reading In the First Circle, which uses the same technique. So, I thought, well, interesting, but not new, Solzhenitsyn was way ahead of her. But, it was a good reading, and I bought a copy of Egan's book on my way out. I was not at all disappointed. The narrative, in the form of distinct chapters all connected by a consistent cast of characters, moves backwards and forwards in time. We see the characters from a variety of perspectives and at different points in their lives, but the spaces are not all filled in. Aging forever-young producers age and wither, as younger aspiring characters find their way into middle age.  Some remain true to their ideals, others sell out, still others seek a settled life after years of wandering. The excesses of the seventies and eighties fade and evolve into the excesses of the 21st century. Along with fashions and fetishes, technology remains in a state of revolution reaching all ages, bringing people closer together while at the same time creating buffers to provide distance. In the culminating chapter, Egan takes her readers into a Shteyngartesque not-so-distant future, in which the youngest downloader on record is three months old, connect and transmit are no longer meaningful concepts, and words such as friend, real, change, and story are "shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks." Everyone is looking for something, and maybe it is something that they can see, hear, and touch.

If you haven't yet read this novel, find a copy at your local library or book store.

Swamplandia!

Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! NY: Vintage, 2011.

R. Stuhr

I had the good fortune to hear Karen Russell speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in November. She was funny and self-deprecating and, although I've been saving as many pennies as I can as of late, I couldn't resist buying not only Swamplandia!, but her first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (have not read this one yet). She chose to read an interesting segment of Swamplandia!--one that was central to the novel but was in many ways a diversion. Reading it out of context gave the uninformed little clue as to what the novel was about, and it startled me when I got to that section in my own reading of the novel. But having said that, the novel is much more serious in theme and tone than I would have expected from Ms. Russell's own demonstrated sense of humor. But this is just an observation and in no way a criticism. I was not disappointed by the book even though my taste tends to veer away from the  gothic sagas of eccentric families raising their children without any of the usual mores and codes. I think of, for instance, Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. And yet, Russell does not forgive or absolve the parents for their neglect and ultimate abandonment of the children. What becomes of them, what they suffer, is serious and life changing. At the same time, we can recognize the desperation and helplessness and good if mistaken intentions of the parents. In fact, we never really learn the whole story or discover the paths that brought the parents together. How did the mother feel about her life? What did she give up and did she have regrets? What were her choices?

Swamplandia! has a dual narration. Segments are narrated in the first person by Ava, the youngest child, and other segments are in the third person. It was always a little jolting to shift from "he" to "I." Early in the novel, the family's tenuous existence catapults toward disaster after the untimely death of the mother. Kiwi, the oldest son, eventually leaves their island and Alligator park (the island and park are both Swamplandia) in the Florida Everglades to try to earn money to save the family from bankruptcy. The middle child, Ossie, a teenage daughter begins communicating with the dead, and Ava, barely in her teens, tries to fill the gap left by her mother. When the father leaves for a few weeks to take care of business (work a second job on the mainland), Ossie drifts off to seek a lover among the dead and Avis to find her sister with the swamp's "bird man." This is the most gripping and poignant part of the novel. The reader is no better informed as to the qualities of the bird man, whether or not he can be trusted and relied upon, than Ava is as she counts on him to help her find her sister and needs him in her state of complete abandonment by all members of her family. As they go deeper into the swamp in search of Ossie the landscape and Ava's situation become more terrifying.

In the meantime Kiwi has gone to the rival amusement park, The World of Darkness, and struggles in the world of minimum wage to earn something to send back to his family.

To say more would be to give too much away. Suffice it to say that Russell is an outstanding story teller, who keeps you turning pages, but gives your mind something to work with and ponder as you read. Her characters have depth and the lines and details of the plot are revealed through their interpretation of events.

Swamplandia! is available as a printed book to be checked out and also as an electronic book to be downloaded from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Dennis Lehane's Novel The Given Day

Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. NY: HarperCollins, 2008

By Walt Giersbach

Tribulation in a Boston Dimly Remembered

The police/mystery novel has always been suspect as literature, even when Umberto Eco and Jasper Fforde transcend genre into a more literary level.  Dennis Lehane skirted this genre tag skillfully in Mystic River; Shutter Island; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Gone, Baby, Gone, creating well-rounded characters who functioned in realistic, inventive story lines.  But, often, his writing remained “mysteries.”  His work in The Given Day, however, exceeds all his former portraits of troubled people trying to function in his troubled Boston area.

Lehane takes the reader back to a relatively unexplored time just after The Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s roared in.  In his treatment of the time and place, he was compared in The New York Times to John Dos Passos and The U.S.A. Trilogy.  Boston’s police department was being paid 1908 poverty-level wages, could be ordered to put in 70-hour weeks, and worked in vermin-infested quarters.  Worse, it was a time when strikers found themselves at the mercy of police nightsticks and attacks by goons, African-Americans didn’t walk through white neighborhoods, anarchists were blowing up buildings, and Nativist cultural attitudes poisoned the civic weal.  The Irish — in Boston, at least — ran the civil service at the expense of the Italians and “Bolsheviks” and for the benefit of the Anglo Brahmins.

Lehane’s rich narrative — in 700 pages — leads inexorably to the police strike of 1919, large-scale rioting in the city, families dissolved by “traitorous” behavior, and wanton murders.  Police officer Aidan “Danny” Coughlin; the African-American, Luther Leonard, who left wife and child after murdering a cocaine dealer; and the immigrant Irish maid, Nora, form the triumvirate of characters working to survive in this turbulent environment.  .

Lehane slowly lets the historical period unfold through the eyes of Babe Ruth, shortly to leave the Red Sox, and shoehorns the Great Bambino in and out of the novel.  Babe’s character is wonderful history, which Lehane has researched beautifully, but unfortunately it has little to do with the story’s development.

By creating this universe called “Boston 1918-19,” Lahane time-travels us into an alternative history that is both distant and familiar.  The streets, department stores and place names are all identifiable today.  While this is entertaining — and emotionally involving — it remains questionable whether Lahane is over-dramatizing the venality, mayhem, cultural biases, and civil breakdown of his city and forebears.  Enjoy The Given Day as drama and enlightenment on issues that plague us today, not history, in spite of the author’s bibliographic sources.
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Reading Lehane’s work (of seven novels and a collection) made me reflect that there are books that launch a neophyte writer’s career, those that put air under the author’s wings, and finally the literary triumph that puts the writer at the top of his game.  The Given Day will give any reader pause to examine the cultural baggage we carry as Americans and that which has been smuggled into our luggage by strangers.  The Given Day is a dense literary work firmly nestled in a fascinating time when the country began to turn another corner.


From the Book Review: Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is Moonlight Mile. You can find Given Day and other Dennis Lehane novels at University of Pennsylvania Libraries and at your favorite branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia


http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Read other reviews by Walter Giersbach at the Favorite Books and Book Review and find out about his fiction at  Allotropic Lucubrations

Will Rogers: A Political Life

Will Rogers: A Political Life by Richard D. White, Jr. Texas Tech University Press, 2011.

Review by J. Hewitt

Will Rogers was an improbable example of the classic American Dream come true.  This book looks at this very public figure as a political animal.  Rogers’ charm and wit propelled him into vaudeville and onto the Broadway stage in the 1920s.  After the rope tricks got stale, he began spicing up his stage act with comic comments about current events. The public and the politicians responded favorably to his gentle, and often shrewd, observations gleaned, in the beginning, from his daily reading of multiple newspapers with breakfast.

As Rogers’ inoffensive barbs brought more fame, he became favored by influential political bosses.  They wanted to be associated with a figure who the public viewed as reflecting the common sense ideas of middle America.

Will Rogers became one of the most popular entertainers in the 1920s and 1930s.  He starred in silent and talking films.  He had a weekly radio program so popular that President Franklin D. Roosevelt scheduled several of his ‘fireside chats’ to follow Will Rogers’ program.

Not an ideologue, Rogers was a life-long Democrat and shared much of Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview. He believed that the United States should stay out of other countries’ troubles while protecting the United States from conflict with a strong military. He did not believe in disarmament conferences, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, or women’s suffrage.  He did believe in using fame to help others, charitable causes like the Mississippi floods in 1927 and the Depression, expanding commercial aviation, baseball, travel, and the New Deal.

Richard D. White’s book seeks to discover how this poorly-educated young man from the Cherokee Nation, now part of Oklahoma, became a confidant of presidents, kings, and princes while preserving his public reputation as just a regular joe.  Using newspaper archives and media accounts of Will Rogers public activities, White gives an account which at times is giddy with admiration and at other times speculative about Rogers’ activities on behalf of U.S. Presidents, but never dull.  Writing in colorful style peppered with Rogers’ one-liners, he makes a persuasive argument that Will Rogers is a unique, even an iconic, character in the American experience.

Available at  at 15 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia

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With Liberty and Justice for Some

Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Salon.com’s blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald tells the story of how we as a country have allowed a culture of elite immunity to flourish.  With Liberty and Justice for Some, he makes a rather old-fashioned argument. American political liberty rests on the assumption that the law reigns supreme. And, if the fundamental requirement of the rule of law is equality then the last forty years of American political history has made a mockery of this idea. The promise of America’s founding has been forsaken by the emergence of a two-tiered justice system.

Greenwald pinpoints the descent into the corrupt culture of elite immunity beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. It was the Nixon pardon which became the template for justifying elite immunity. President Ford, who if you believe Seymour Hersh (and Greenwald does), was selected as Agnew’s replacement because of his willingness to protect Nixon.  It was Ford who made the impassioned plea of empathy for Nixon i.e. because he had been through so much already and because the country needed to “look forward.”  In essence this call for empathy was a disguised appeal for aristocratic privilege that was granted and used as a perniciously burgeoning precedent.

The shenanigans associated with Nixon era criminality were followed closely by successively more brazen acts.  The law-breaking that went along with the Iran-Contra scandal (its subsequent cover-up and pardons) followed by the refusal of the Clinton administration to do anything about it gave way to a crescendo of felonies and war crimes committed by members of the Bush #43 administration.

In addition to crimes disguised as policy decisions receiving immunity, membership privileges were extended to the “corporate partners” as well.  The political criminals of George W. Bush’s administration merely had to utter the word “terrorism” and the Democratic Congress swiftly and obediently complied in allowing immunity to be extended to telecom corporations which had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with uninhibited impunity. The telecom immunity battle was the point at which politicians and corporations perfected immunizing private sector elites.  

In keeping with tradition and violating the law himself to do so, President Obama overlooked the crimes of the Bush administration because he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (p. 54) One need not wonder what would happen to a defendant in criminal court (naturally not from the political or corporate elite) who tells the presiding judge that while dozens of people saw him shoot another down in cold blood he is “looking forward” now.  The defendant would almost certainly be joining the 1% of the adult population in the United States that are currently in jail or prison.

Then there was the late financial criminality of Wall Street run amok.  Unlike the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 1980s which resulted in the Federal government bailing out the cousin of the banking industry to the tune of $150 billion, the 2008 meltdown which occasioned a bailout at least seventy times larger, no one has been sent to jail or even charged with a crime. Greenwald quotes Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi: “The only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess – Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general – are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.” (p.117) Much like his former Senate colleague Charles Schumer of  New York  (a.k.a. “Senator Wall Street”) Obama was not about to turn the party over to “crazy, anti-business liberals.”

Whereas the Bush administration only threatened to prosecute whistle blowers the Obama administration, attempting to become the undisputed champion of elite immunity and privilege, has aggressively carried out these threats.  The Obama war on Wikileaks and PFC Bradley Manning is an illustration of this practice. “If you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.  But if you expose any of these lawless actions by publishing the truth about what was done, then you are a criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.” (p.262) 

Greenwald makes what can be construed as a basically conservative argument.  While he admits that there has never been anything like equality before the law (we achieved universal suffrage in this country about the same time we all bought color TV sets) he nevertheless decries the abandonment of the de jure ideal of the rule of law.  Greenwald does a solid job of recounting the “what” of history but he does not attempt to reckon with the “why” in this book. Sometimes art is short and life is long but the question of why is it that the American political class bothers less and less with a pretense of legality is of interest.

Doing my best to avoid a Marxist-smarty-pants-post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc conclusion is difficult. I think Slavoj Zizek’s contention that we are in a post-ideological epoch certainly has some validity.  Accordingly, it is not “hurray the beast ideology is at long last dead” as much as it is “we are so totally in control at this point that we don’t have to pay lip service to any nonsense about equality anymore.” A decadent political culture which allows a proud war criminal such as Dick Cheney to go on television, openly admit to his role in the crime of waterboarding while mocking the authorities who failed to lock him up, is evidence of a political system that not only tolerates but encourages open displays of obscene arrogance.

Soon to be available at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Check your library or local book store.

The book review heard David Harvey, professor of geography and anthropology at CUNY,  speak last night as part of the Penn Humanities Forum series of lectures. His lecture followed the same themes outlined by Hatch above, emphasizing the growing and solidifying disparity in wealth in this country and around the world. His most recent book is available at Penn Libraries. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 2010. HB95 .H37 2010

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