Reviews - Books

A review by Shelby Wardlaw
Vintage. 208 pages. $15

Behind the dystopian plot of Jesse Ball's new book The Curfew lies an in-depth meditation on the purpose and state of the artist. At one point, the protagonist William remembers his violin teacher's instruction regarding the proper way to play a sonata: "You must be brutal, terrible, but with great sympathy, sympathy for all things, and yet no mercy." Accordingly, The Curfew does not lack for sadness and difficulty. Yet Ball harbors an artist's appreciation for his raw material; he chooses words that will evoke and yet not devastate. He is, at times, brutal, but always deeply sympathetic towards his characters. The Curfew is a hushed novel, not overly ambitious, but unrelenting in its demonstration of the power and scope of art.

Structured like a classical sonata, The Curfew is broken up into three movements — exposition, development, and recapitulation. The plot chronicles a single day in the lives of renowned former concert violinist William and his daughter Molly. Molly does not speak; her father is the only one who understands her sign language. Molly's decision not to speak is never fully explained, an omission indicative of Ball's writing: his simple prose uses the reader's imagination to supplement the narrative. Molly could be mute. She could be traumatized by the disappearance of her mother several years earlier. Ball is comfortable letting the reader decide.

The first part of the novel, the exposition of the "sonata," begins out on the street, where a gunshot has shattered the peace of the early morning. The reader quickly understands that William and Molly live under a repressive regime: civilian life is brutally restricted and all artistic expression has been banned. Plain-clothes policemen roam the streets, arresting and interrogating anyone out after curfew. Ball spends little time detailing the history and nature of the political situation. He is content to have the fact of political repression be the context without limiting his narrative to any one ideology, making the point that repression, no matter the ideal behind it, all looks the same.

The Curfew is a page-turner. It is also a quick read, partly because of Ball's experimental use of white space. Just as citizens in a repressive political environment rely on what is not said to communicate what should be, so Ball uses the blank spaces between his printed lines to indicate important thoughts, pauses in time, and key hesitations. At some points, the white space is used to set the tone or pace of the day. After the local symphony was disbanded, William began writing epitaphs for a stonemason. As he makes his appointments with families of the deceased, the dialogue with the mourners becomes spaced out on the page: what they have to say is often difficult and William is patient. William's epitaphs are poetic; he handles death gingerly but without fear.

At other times, the scarcity of words invites the reader to enter the story. After a particularly politically charged appointment, William stands at the top of a stairwell. The words "and stood for one minute, then another" take up the whole page. The reader is forced to pause and instinctively fill in what might be running through William's head.

In the second part of the novel — the development — William attends a covert revolutionary meeting, leaving Molly to be looked after by their neighbors, the Gibbons. Even in the development section, Ball gives his characters just enough description to make them real, often allowing their mannerisms to do most of the personality building work. Mr. Gibbons, for example, "[speaks] with his hands", has a "reddish colored" face and "very blue" eyes. William snaps his pencil in half after completing each epitaph. Yet somehow these small details flesh out the characters enough so that we totally believe in their existence; each character is distinct and identifiable. In fact, The Curfew makes other books look downright chatty. Why do other authors spend time and energy on miniscule details when Ball does it better, and with fewer words? At the meeting, William receives information about his wife's murder. While William attempts the dangerous walk home after curfew, Molly and Mr. Gibbons write and prepare for a puppet show.

The performance of the puppet show fills out this last and most compelling section of the novel. Written by Molly and brought to life by Mr. Gibbons, who was a grand puppet master before the rise of the present regime, the play recapitulates the day's events, giving us a glimpse of Molly's perspective. The show blurs the lines between art and reality, often making the reader question what actions are under the control of the puppeteer and what actions occur independently. The effect is a surreal, dark and childlike landscape along the lines of Alice in Wonderland.

Within the device of the puppet show, Ball examines the role of the artist in society. As they look at the different puppets available to them, Mr. Gibbons introduces Molly to a special puppet, the Jester:

"He is aware that the puppet show is going on, and of his place in it. That doesn't mean that he knows about the puppeteer, not exactly. His information, of course, is not always correct. However, he does know much more than any of the other puppets. Sometimes, why sometimes he can even see the audience."

The artist sees the strings of motivation behind human movements. His purpose is to the look beyond the immediate surface: to not only see the character of a person but also his context, the limits of his stage, its trappings. More specifically, the Jester is the writer: "He is a teller of stories, but a great liar as well."

Ball is a beautiful liar and a delicate manipulator. But this is a book about narrative, deception and control; the reader is illuminated, not hoodwinked. I couldn't help but close the cover on The Curfew feeling somehow wiser, as if he has gained a sense of life's stage, its trappings, and maybe an outline of an audience. An insight, in other words, into the purpose of the play, into a larger truth.

Shelby Wardlaw is a resident of Austin, TX. Her book reviews have been published online at The Review Review, H.O.W., BookReporter.com, and on her blog, ReadGood

A review by Chris Bundy
Future Tense Books 136 pages. $11

B for Book Review
—a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. It is often carried out in periodicals, some of which might be online and include other literary works such as fiction, poetry, essays, art, and interviews. The book review length may vary from a single paragraph to a significant essay.

Book reviews can be an assessment of the book's literary merit or its illumination of a particular topic. The book review can also be employed to reveal the book reviewer's intellect on a number of subjects, knowledge of and affection for the author and/or genre, or to explore the book reviewer's distaste for the author and/or the genre.

A for Alphabet
The Book of Freaks insists on a combination of division and harmony, like the contemporary novel-in-stories, which contains standalone stories unified by reoccurring characters or a common setting. While Jamie Iredell shuns those two strategies, the book still holds together, rather, fuses as one. Consider, as comparison, the preludes and fugues of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, a work noted for its structural regularities yet broad array of styles. Iredell's Freaks succeeds similarly by maintaining a recognizable structure in his A to Z approach, much as Bach composed his music using familiar Baroque melodies that explore the entire range of all 24 major and minor keys, i.e., subjects any student of music would recognize. Freaks begins with A (the "Acknowledgements" page) and ends with Z ("Ze-end"), attempting, it seems, to incorporate the entire range of the known world, each entry describing a "freak" of some sort. The A to Z construction is a strategy for organization—it is the only element of the book that provides us a way forward. The novelty of the structure is at first comforting and even amusing, and, for the most part, there is order in this chaos. Iredell's entries are marked by multiple and varied voices, each held together by a central argument. For Iredell, the "freaks" themselves bind from A to Z. Bach's individual numbers—from C major to B flat minor—are bound by a "well-tempered" tuning system in which all keys are in tune with one another. Iredell too links his numbers with the argument that we are the freaks, unique as individual numbers but united under the freak flag nonetheless, all in tune with one another.

P is for Prose. Poems.
Freaks allows you to linger in its sentences while pushing you forward with both narrative and nonsequitur, more often than not in the same section. "Chicken Fried Steak" opens with a description of that all-American favorite, moves quickly to introduce Jesse, a man not unlikely to show up in a Larry Brown short story, and ends with what does not follow, a description of snowboarders whooping down a nearby mountain. In between, Jesse buys some Skittles in a biker bar with the only money he has, foregoing the chicken fried steak he dreams of.

"There had been a rash of car break-ins. Glass littered the streetsides like millions of diamonds. The air hung cold, the sky white, and a few snowflakes fluttered down. The last of Jesse's Skittles got so cold they hurt his teeth when he crunched into them."

The paragraph's power resides in both its lyricism and its depiction of Jesse as he moves from the biker bar where he buys his Skittles and outside to a memory of an ex-girlfriend back to chicken fried steak and finally on to our seemingly arbitrary snowboarders. By the end of this typically-short section, we realize that the arbitrary is not at all—all is woven into the fabric of this brief glimpse of Jesse's world, even the snowboarders who stand in joyful contrast to Jesse's melancholy stroll and Skittle crunching.

G for Guidebook
In the event you feel lost in Freaks, wondering which way to turn (even if there are alphabetized guide posts, you may feel a sense of disorientation), then Iredell includes "Front Matter" to help you navigate the text, a guidebook for the guidebook. Of course, you're on your own until you get to F.

"You should study every subject in this book. To diffuse the knowledge of FREAKS is the professed design of the following work. . . . Instead of dismembering the FREAKS of Earth, by attempting to treat them intelligibly under a multitude of technical terms, they have digested the principles of every FREAK in the form of systems or distinct treaties, and explained the terms as they occur in the order of the alphabet, with references to the classifications to which they belong."

C for Compiler
Iredell is at once slave to his form, this alphabetized list, and liberated by his disregard for the reader's expectations, what feels occasionally like a middle finger to the reader, and an exploration of what an exploration of subject can be. His distinctive voice—a mixture of a formal, disembodied narrator peering into the goddamnedest places on earth—wobbles between precision and misfire. In the stronger entries, Iredell points out the absurd, the ironic, and the silly without giggling at his own cleverness, an objective compiler of the world's oddities. In the weaker sections, we either feel Iredell sneer or he is subverted by the same cleverness.

Y for Yuerba Buenians, et al.
The opening promises a telling tale of historical determination:

"Yerba Buenians are an extinct race that met disaster after filling in the primary cove upon which their modest settlement was initially built with their mostly unused names."

We recognize the arcane subject, and even some of the playfulness, but miss the pathos.

Of course, attempting to find satisfaction in precedent here is futile. The author promises nothing of the sort. That Iredell ignores much of the world for his esoteric list of "freaks" is the larger beauty of even some of the weaker entries.

G for Gag
In "Graphic Novel, The," we get an illustration of a typical graphic panel—an empty square. But then Iredell asks us to look more closely to see that the empty square actually contains a snow-covered field in which "very little happens." Here the reader might worry that under W we will find a minimalist illustration and caption that reads "ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch." The novelty of his arbitrary subject matter vanishes, the straight man replaced by a well-worn gag. When an entire section is devoted to "Blurbs" for the book, many of them as absurd as sections of the book, including an inventory of typical blurb jargon beginning with "acrobatic" and concluding with "zany," two words that have or will probably be used to describe this book, we nod in agreement.

F for Freaks
So as not to seem disingenuous, there are also actual freaks in Iredell's book. In "Autofellate," we are introduced to an entire line-up of freakshow freaks in a bar, from Piss Puddles the Clown, who gargles the chorus to "My Sharona" with his own piss, and a woman who performs a light-bulb-in-the-pussy-trick.

This is the freakshow of note, the one in which we, as us, watch from behind a shield of plexiglass to protect us from them, so that we go away feeling grateful for our banal lives. But Iredell seems to suggest that we are not so far removed from these freaks either.

Freaks found in this book also include:

a bearded lady (of course)
people who walk on their hands
an armless wonder
those with large and rapidly-growing breasts
a man with a shoe for a head
a man with a tiny head (aka, microcephalic)
dicphalic parapagi
ectrodactlylics
contrarians
assholes
White People, and
Americans (God Bless).

S for State of Wonder
Iredell often plays with the obvious, yet what we fail to recognize as wondrous and strange. See the entry under "What We Call Life."

"In life people stand on beaches under white clouds. They all stare at the clouds, though there's nothing about the clouds that makes a discernable shape or could be in any way interesting. Some say that this was before language, but those making this distinction assume a false sense of superiority, which is almost always rousted out by way of their automobile choices and style of dress. This is universally true of domestically-produced autos and imported clothing. What is perhaps most notable, however, is viewing the subjects in the convenience store. There aren't any beaches in this state. But if there were, even these people would stand around like those staring at clouds, unsure of what beer to choose."

Iredell's depiction of humans in the haze of quotidian states staring up at the sky in search of security underscores our need to find meaning even in our most mundane moments.

F for False Sense of Security
In the midst of the irony and wit, there is a plaintive quality to the everyday illustrations of lives lived. Iredell finds the "real mystery" not in the headlines, but in the bedroom shadows and the capricious nature of life itself, in which at any moment our system of order, our perceived patterns might be scrambled, precisely because there is no order, only metaphor, that this book, like life, is merely a contrivance, a construct that gives us a sense of security: our lives may be changed forever by nothing more than a falling tree.

C for Cumulative
By the end, there is a surprising cumulative effect, a feeling that the A to Z construction was not nearly as arbitrary as first expected.

N for None of the Above
Freaks, an encyclopedia of the everyday, does not allow for the standard book review. There is no sequence of events with which to unfold narrative and pull us through a summary review. There is no life to examine, unless we consider all life, for Freaks is that kind of book—a panorama that swings between the lines of American life. There is no obvious theme, unless you go for everything, e.g., "a connected series of conclusions deduced from self-evident or previously discovered principles." There is no protagonist to root for, no lush setting to calm us. How does one then assess an entry like this sample from the B section, "Big Legs," which begins: "Breached out the birth canal massive legs first, legs like gas planets, in leg-shape" and follows with metaphors in which her big legs become Studebakers? Is this poetry? Fiction?

We read on out of simple curiosity, like Alice down her rabbit hole.

Chris Bundy's stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines, from Glimmer Train and Atlanta Magazine to DIAGRAM and The Collagist. He teaches writing and literature at Savannah College of Art & Design-Atlanta.

A review by John Findura
Tarpaulin Sky Press. 88 pages. $12

I was on a train somewhere between Trenton and Baltimore when I reached this section of Shelly Taylor's Black-Eyed Heifer:

On the outskirts of the limit line's an old wooden covered bridge, creaks & echoes mack dab in the middle. I might load you up & take you there, were you of the things that stand freely & grope. Searchplane? Searchplane. Every which a way I know I want only from my own.

In some kind of déjà vu it brought me back years ago when I took a train from Newark to New Orleans. Because of the excessive July heat, the train managed to break down, lose its air-conditioning, and pull into New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal a mere 36 hours after leaving The Garden State. Along the way we picked up a rag-tag band of travelers—some on business, some on vacation, some just completely lost, and two girls in their early-20s with a two-month train pass who were traveling the country by rail.

One of them, with dreadlocks and a nose ring, was originally from Portland, Oregon. The other, the one with the bandanna and five-pounds of necklaces, grew up in Georgia. I know this because in the middle of the night I listened to them talking across the aisle. Their lilting, rambling murmur plucked me from my own whirling thoughts and into some strange, uncanny valley. The titillating thrill of eavesdropping balanced with my own self-awareness: there was something thrilling in sensing the shifts of culture and accents within one's own country—in lives too close to conveniently categorize as "other." It's that experience that mimics what it feels like to read Taylo's mixture of prose and poetry: a pageant of unclassifiable lines that seem as if they were just plucked from the humid ether.

Around 3am Bandanna-Girl starting telling Dreadlock-Girl about living on the family farm in Georgia. I'm sure she mentioned the town, and its name was probably something really pleasing to the ear, like Juniper Springs or Waterloo Hollow. She talked about how she had named all the cows and could describe each of their personalities. Then Bandanna-Girl started talking about the horses and how her mother would stand out on the porch and call to her and tell her to wipe down the horses, and she would carry buckets of water across the yard and pour it over their twitching muscles. Bandanna-Girl still had a thick Southern Peach accent and said things like "you know it's time when it's time," a phrase which could make its home on any page of Black-Eyed Heifer.

Somewhere in the south, the air-conditioning went and the train stopped. The car was only half filled, but had the strong smell of people—not in a negative way, but in the way a pair of work jeans can tell you its owner's occupation even after a thousand washes. Almost everyone was asleep. The couple in the two seats in front of me had passed out after trying to have covert sex under a blanket for an hour-and-a-half. But Bandanna-Girl was still talking about her cousin who used to build go-carts as a kid and when he was 16 he started racing stock cars, and she was mad because he made some money and his mother, her aunt, sold their two horses which Bandanna-girl had cared for. There was a single fly buzzing around us.

For 30 hours I was unable to sleep and listened to these two girls talk. In Mississippi we stopped for an hour at a small station and were allowed to walk around outside. It was morning—even so, the air was dusty and thick. When I re-boarded the train, two guys in their early-20s had taken the seats in front of Bandanna-Girl and Dreadlock-Girl. They both wore tee-shirts with no sleeves and green John Deere hats. They looked like they had been called in from the casting department.

They told the girls they were headed to New Orleans for the weekend and that they should join them. The girls politely demurred. The boys took out chewing tobacco and the girls went to the snack car. I must have fallen asleep because I came to with a jolt, the collar of my shirt soaking with sweat. The conductor shook my shoulder. I grabbed my bag and got off the train.

I never saw those girls again, but the memory of them, of their endless conversation, their subtle dismissal of these two boys, their sweaty, bare shoulders disembarking a too hot and too broken-down train in Louisiana—it comes back to me now.

As Taylor writes it:

When you need to know what you need, look to your ladies. Each one goes in & comes out alone. A man could never tell you this in this way.

This book is Taylor's first full-length effort. And retelling my overlong, untidy vignette is the closest I can come to describing her work. The language, the imagery, the quiet suffocation of stagnant air and the smell of tired muscles: Black-Eyed Heifer is 88-pages of overheard conversations, snippets of thoughts, feet pounding on the wooden porch followed by the screams of horses.

Black-Eyed Heifer is also filled with a rural kind of dark wisdom—the kind of living some of us have forgotten, the kind with "Brown lawns, tumbleweed in the nosegay handle" where "the windows are boarded up" and a "Big truck hums the way a fine diesel should."

Pieces of some type of shattered Southern Gothic spring up continuously, such as in this section, where the speaker admits:

I have dreams I watch over the dead bodies of people I've never met, all stretched out & I'm bodiless myself but there. Whether or not I ever meet these people the scenario is of a third-eye layout. The corner spec becomes the horse, draws up to the man with a lasso who is tipping his hat, giddy-up, whipping off for morning a large-scale fire on the tin< roofs the moon just left again forever.

With little plot to sustain itself, what is to be gained from Black-Eyed Heifer? Maybe a language. A language laid down upon a forgotten geography. Maybe a view into a slower way of life. Maybe a voyeuristic listen into a secret conversation on a train, or next to a derelict payphone down the street from the local Publix. This is the new geography and language of Yoknapatawpha County; in Taylor's pages the words slowly grow over you like kudzu. Slowly, but inevitably, they overtake the soil, the roads, the train tracks, your whole country.

John Findura is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a guest blogger for The Best American Poetry blog; his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

A review by Joseph Salvatore
Scribner. 514 pages. $30

My college writing teacher was a friend and a great fan of Ann Beattie. This was during the late 80s. In his fiction class, we read lots of Beattie (as well as Carver and Ford and Mason and Phillips). But mostly we read Ann Beattie. We read Distortions and Secrets and Surprises the same semester we read Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Never stated, yet somehow understood by all of us, was the sense that Beattie's style (and the style of all of those writers) was the true aesthetic idiom for rendering contemporary American life. We were unafraid to call that style minimalism-that term was then not a dirty word at all, but an efficient descriptor. It smacked of other synonyms that were gaining currency toward the end of that decade: stripped down, spare, clean, essential; there was even something of the nascent garage-band grunge to it-linguistic flannel shirts and jeans replacing the spandex and platform shoes of the glam-rock past.

It was more than simply knowing our taste-we felt it in our bodies, a jittery impatience with the florid texts we were assigned in our literature classes. There seemed to be an earthy grit powdering the white spaces between those sentences in the kind of fiction that Beattie was writing; white spaces that seemed more like a new form of punctuation than an absence of text. Despite some similarities of subject matter (alcohol, divorce, love gone wrong, homes wrecked) and vast differences of character demographics (Beattie's urban, educated baby boomers compared to Carver's less-educated, lower-middle-class underground men and women), the so-called minimalists presented a life as one might describe it over a beer or a bong. A recognition of emptiness was natural, essential, to this style-emptiness given aestheticized form.

We wrote Beattie-rip-off stories that were little more than attenuated zen koans. We eschewed denouement. "Falling action" equaled "weak ending"; an epiphany could be barely more than the lighting of a cigarette or a question gone unanswered or the decision to spend the night with someone-unhappily and out of wedlock, of course. And every week we dutifully snatched our New Yorker from the mailbox, hoping not for an Updike, Cheever or Gallant or even another brilliant but brow-cinching Barthelme, but for an Ann Beattie story.

Fortunately, now we can have them all-in one volume-with the publication of Ann Beattie's 17th book, The New Yorker Stories, a collection of every story Beattie published in that illustrious magazine, the Holy Grail for all creative writing students. The title of the collection is, in some ways, pure Beattie: employing a cultural signifier to stand in for the myriad complexities contained therein. A glance at the table of contents affords the same slim insight. All you get are a roster of one-word titles: "Vermont," "Downhill," "Colorado," "Weekend," "Shifting," Waiting," "Gravity," "Times," and "Desire." But those titles-and this new collection-conceal a wider diversity of narrative approaches than is often attributed to Beattie.

This career-encompassing collection of 48 stories, beginning with her first, published in 1974 ("A Platonic Relationship") and ending with a publication in 2006 ("The Confidence Decoy"), reveals Beattie's consistent thematic preoccupations: charismatic men (either careless or too careful); numb but hyper-observant women (often passive or complacent, existentially floating); and, in the later stories, children (abandoned, damaged, cynical, resentful)-all caught in the gears of domestic rupture, marital dissolution, and cultural drift (and, it is true, rarely are they far from a kitchen sink). But the collection also reveals Beattie's artistic preoccupations. Her stories most often privilege character over plot, surface features over deep interiority, the slightest of epiphanies, and story endings that leave you turning the page to see if there's something more. When reading these stories one realizes how submerged her artistry is, her narrative techniques often as buried as her characters' inner lives. Beattie renders a world that is a kind of demented domestic; in her early stories, set in the liberated, tuned-in, countercultural 1970s, her female characters seem less Mary Tyler Moore than Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Her early stories are less chilly than chilling. These stories are uncanny in the sense that Freud intended the term, meaning "anti-home."

In a decade when women were saying "We are not our mothers," Beattie's female characters of her 1970s stories seem unaware of any such distinction: Lenore, the protagonist in the masterful "Weekend" (published in 1976), may be unmarried, but she allows her domestic partner, George, with whom she is raising their two children, to carry on affairs with much younger women (often under their own roof); and she does so not for any free-love, liberating principle, but rather because: "She has a comfortable house. She cooks. She keeps busy and she loves her children." When two of George's former students, Sarah and Julie, arrive to spend the weekend, he takes off for long walks with Sarah, leaving Julie behind with Lenore to do dishes. Later, in front of Lenore, George hugs Sarah and professes his love for her. Several characters express their disbelief at her complacency; Julie says: "to have it turn out like this . . . I mean, I couldn't act the way you do." Lenore responds, "For all I know, nothing's going on . . . . For all I know, your friend is flattering herself, and George is trying to make me jealous." Cooking, housekeeping, children, turning a blind eye to a husband's infidelities: such stories remind us how strong a hold the 50s still had in the 70s.

A similar complacency affects her male characters. In "Colorado," Robert is devoted to his friend Penelope, whom he has secretly loved for years: "Actually, he had no reason for being in New Haven except to be near Penelope…. He had told himself that Penelope would leave Johnny and become his lover, but it never happened. He had tried very hard to get it to happen." Later, after he has been up all night, searching for a stoned and lost Penelope, she shows up at his apartment. "I slept with Cyril," she tells him. "What," Robert says. "When did you sleep with Cyril?" "At the house," she says. "And at his place." "Recently?" he says. "A couple of days ago," she says. And then we watch that careful, smitten Robert become suddenly careless: When she asks him to impulsively pick up and move to Colorado with her, he does it. In "Tuesday Night" (1977), the usually "inordinately kind" Dan is kindly sympathetic to a mouse the protagonist, Joanna, wants disposed of. But to appease her, he later finds a way to "beat it to death with a screwdriver."

Beattie's men and women live with hope as well as the mild anxiety that any change in any situation might bring about something new: whether it be a diet, a divorce, or a move to Colorado.

In the 1980s and after, the stories feel less like ensemble dramas than personal explorations of both the artist and her art. (Several stories feature characters with the name "Ann" or "Annie" ["Afloat," "Find and Replace"].) The plotting feels less managed than in such early stories as "A Platonic Relationship" or "Colorado." Beattie's late fiction becomes more textured with respect to character and form. There's a lyrical quality to these final stories, not so much on the level of the sentence, but in their structure and movement. There is a sense that we are reading the deeper-looking work of a veteran artist at her full power.

Joseph Salvatore is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. His story collection, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, will be published next year from BOA Editions. He teaches writing and literature at The New School.

An Age of Terror and Forgetting
by Ranbir Sidhu

A review of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar
Duke University Press. 2010. 217 pages.

Among the many symptoms of living in an age of a perpetual war on terrorism is amnesia. There are times we forget when it began, and for those growing up in this age, I can only imagine that it has the shopworn quality of grim permanency that those of us who came of age in the Cold War once felt. That war had no beginning, not in our lifetimes at least, and it sure felt like it never would have an end, except the most ugly, in nuclear annihilation. The fears must be different today. Instead of global extinction, the destruction children probably fear is localized and personal. A terrorist bomb will blow up their world.

It is the curiously personal nature of the war on terror that sets it apart from other wars. For not only is the destruction we fear personal, but the killers themselves are few in number, walk potentially among us, and every few months, one of them emerges in a grainy surveillance image or mug shot or threatening video. Perhaps this is just the natural progression. In the 80s, it was the Me Generation, and in the 90s, the Army of One. Do we need now to personalize what in the past we had demonized as foreign hordes? Or have our enemies come to understand the unsettling power of an individual whose sole stated aim is to do nothing but wreak havoc?

There is another kind of amnesia at play. For as these faces appear at night on our television screens, they just as quickly disappear, vanishing from thought and memory. Some are convicted, some are killed, and about some we have no idea what happens. Amitava Kumar's A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb resurrects some of these faces, as if from the dead, and in doing so, helps chart the ever-changing geography of this new world and also how it distorts our basic everyday moralities and is reshaping how we think about ourselves and how we construct images of others.

Organized around two FBI sting operations conducted in the US, Kumar tells the stories of Hemant Lakhani and Matin Siraj, both hapless and seemingly lost in their adoptive country, though in quite different ways. Lakhani was a failed businessman who was persuaded by a government informant, a failed businessman himself, to attempt to order up to fifty anti-aircraft Stinger missiles to be used against commercial aircraft in the US. What's striking in the Lakhani case is that under no circumstances would he have been able to procure the weapons himself, let alone use them. He didn't even know how to hold one when it was produced. The FBI led him by the nose, secretly shipping one weapon themselves, and the picture that emerges is of a bitter, self-serving failure, and easy prey for an informant looking for a big paycheck and FBI operatives looking for a splashy headline. That his arrest and conviction in no way served to make the US more secure should be worrying, because it also pulled resources away from the actual, and more difficult, task of searching out individuals intent on destruction.

In Siraj's case, the plot involved planting bombs at the 34^th Street/Herald Square subway station. In this case too, the government played a heavy hand in leading Siraj from his own anger at what he perceived were American crimes to a willingness to act, though his complicity here seems clearer. Siraj is an even sadder case. In tapes of his conversations with informants, he says he is willing to help in an attack, but that he must ask his mother's permission first, and continually we are confronted with a man who clearly does not seem to be fully aware of what he is signing up for, and that he lacks the basic intelligence to understand this.

The stories of both men enter to varying degrees the legal and moral gray zone of government entrapment. Neither man was anywhere near capable of carrying out their threats, and it is very likely that neither would even have imagined attempting such actions had they not been approached by informants. The informants in both instances have strong motives to bring in a conviction, as do the federal officers and the picture Kumar paints is of a new legal and police enforcement landscape where all parties involved are encouraged to collude in willing blindness so long as an imagined victory is delivered. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001," Kumar writes, "all around us the world has been retooling itself to define the public interest, but only in a limited, perverse way as a global ecology of anti-terrorism."

More broadly, it is the landscape of what has happened to our perceptions of our basic rights in the wake of 9/11 and how individuals, especially contemporary artists, have responded that is Kumar's subject. All wars reduce the enemy to a caricature. What is different here is that with such an ill-defined enemy, we are finding ourselves redefining whole classes of people as potential murderers. Kumar writes, "A distancing optic allows individuals and families to blur into whole communities and nations." Lives and social structures are being distorted to the point of unrecognizability.

He doesn't limit himself to the US, but also looks at India, which has modeled its own war on terror on the American version, as if it has bought its own franchise. Here especially, countless innocents have found their lives destroyed by the state in unmistakable miscarriages of justice and Kumar's book acts as a worthy reminder of the what is we are doing to ourselves as we build our new surveillance states.

I doubt anyone can write coherently on the war on terror, or whatever it's being called today. Kumar's attempt is a worthy one, and speaks to one of the central problems of writing about this war. What the war actually is, the battlefield, the players, when it started, what will define how it ends, who we are fighting and who is fighting us, what it is we are even fighting for-- all of these questions, and many more, remain ill-defined and their answers, when given, highly politicized. Any attempt to navigate this territory becomes necessarily narrow, and the attendant frustrations-- accusation without solution, polemic without a balancing nuance-- are commonplace, and are found in abundance in Kumar's book.

But that's the problem, isn't it, and Kumar often seems to be saying as much. We are, after all, in the middle of this war. For all we know, we might still be in the early years, especially if the doomsayers of the necessity of unending war prove true. As I read Kumar's book, I found myself see-sawing between shared indignation at the abuses he points to and annoyance at the occasional narrowness and parochialism of his political stance. I suppose what I wanted most, and missed, was the author's personal journey through this territory. If the war on terror dehumanizes the individual, what better way to humanize it than place oneself inside its story.

Kumar did this beautifully in a previous work, Husband of a Fanatic, which charts his journey as a Hindu from India married to a Muslim from Pakistan. Here, he offers it only near the end, in a moving story about meeting an old family friend, Colonel Prakash, who is serving in the Indian Army in Kashmir, a region which has the dubious distinction of being the most heavily militarized place on the planet. The sad, drunken, maudlin encounter with a man who has been destroyed is beautifully told, as is Kumar's growing frustration and anger. Torture remains commonplace in Kashmir, and it's torture of a very bloody degree, where few survive intact, and for years Colonel Prakash has been sleepwalking through these soul-killing territories. The picture Kumar paints makes me wonder how many such Colonels our war on terror is breeding, and in addition to all the lives it is snuffing out, how many souls are dying in the process.

The modern calculus that shifts us from a sense of worldwide destruction to personal destruction has consequences. During the Cold War, we were in it together. We would all live, or we would all die. Today, we watch nervously as the zones of destruction are shifted as far from us as possible. A million Iraqis might die, several thousand GIs, but I won't. Our only comfort is a neurotic's comfort. If we are to live with ourselves, it requires us to forget the price we are paying for what we imagine is our lives.

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis
Knopf / Jonathan Cape,470pp
Reviewed by Robin Mookerjee

When Mr. Amis releases a new novel his many readers want to know if it is fun – as fun as works like London Fields. Other commentators busily ascribe views to the author on the basis of fictional dialogue. No contemporary novelist is subject to as many personal attacks as Amis, whose reviewers seem to think it appropriate to size him up personally as if he were a newcomer to their Upper West Side (or Islington) circle. Generally, the verdict is that Amis thinks too well of himself. So, when were distinguished authors expected to be self-effacing? These complaints conceal resentment that an author, out of key with contemporary tastes, is conspicuously talented and shows it. If the "courageous" authors of novels with three-word titles ending in "wife" or "daughter" could write like Amis, they probably would.

The nadir of recent entries in ad hominem criticism greeting The Pregnant Widow may be found in Katha Pollitt's Slate review. The Nation columnist begins by implying that the author shouldn't be taken too seriously, since he has a habit of making provocative remarks for the sake of publicity. She quotes two: "all leftists are Stalinists" and "British Muslims should be strip-searched at random." Why does Pollitt misrepresent Amis' remarks and call them "aggressively dumb"? (Well-informed readers may be inclined to reverse the charges.) At least she draws her ascriptions from nonfiction sources: a memoir about Stalin and an interview in The Times Magazine. However, she reviews Amis' latest fictional work as a failed history of the feminist movement. It is insufficiently comprehensive, she writes: where is the revolutionary spirit? Perhaps she forgets that it is a story and not a cultural history.

Amis' story treats the sexual revolution from a fairly unique point of view, and therein lies the problem. A variety of commentators approach nearly any fictional work as if it were a position paper from a neophyte party member who didn't get the platform right. Amis, a serious novelist, approaches fraught issues from a questioning and willfully naïve standpoint. It is naïve not because he is ignorant of the scientific progress of history but because he sets aside received wisdom on a given issue, allowing himself and his readers a fresh vista. His bracing, questioning spirit is uncomfortable for some and may be seen as confrontational in spirit. But Mr. Amis is merely reopening cold cases, and he sees them everywhere.

As a result, critics are vexed in their attempts to apply labels to him: paleoliberal, Blitcon, neocon, etc. There is nothing new in this; satirists from Rabelais to Swift to Muriel Spark have always been difficult to label. If only they could be seen as a function of a genre of belief they would be tamed, since they are disturbing precisely because their perspective remains indeterminate. In his relative indifference to abuse, Amis resembles Mailer more than his obvious precursors, Nabokov, Bellow, and Roth. Each of these satirists, however, found himself on the receiving end of sustained and vigorous name-calling.

Such animus is especially curious when applied to The Pregnant Widow. The book's frightful subject matter (sex) and use of commonplace words for body parts raised some manicured eyebrows, but it is mild stuff on the surface. The setting is pastoral and the words in its lexicon, including the main character's given name, are strange new specimens as mouthed by the liberated 1970s cast at a remote Italian villa. Harry Mount of The Daily Telegraph worried, apparently with a straight face, that Amis' wife might be disturbed by the author's obsession with breasts. Sensitive readers understand that words like "sexual intercourse," "breasts," "cock," "arse," and "cunt," repeated frequently in meandering, idle conversations in a Brideshead-like setting, are part of an elaboration on the comedy of youth. Being young and somewhat ridiculous, these characters see themselves as reinventing the most fundamental aspects of human experience, when in fact – male and female – they don't have the least idea what they are doing.

Is such comedy an aging author's unseemly display of prurience? Far from it. Amis' earlier satires – especially The Rachel Papers, Money, and London Fields – books still kept behind the desk at indie bookstores for fear of shoplifters – contained a lot of verbal pleasure-seeking, discussion of drug use and sexual acting-out for the delectation of author and reader. Amis was not encouraging or promoting misbehavior, merely revealing his and our pleasure in hearing and thinking about it. Later books, the literary comedy The Information, the memoirs Experience and Koba the Dread, Yellow Dog, and The House of Meetings, contain transgressive elements aplenty, but subordinate them to questions about horrors in our collective past and the shimmery thinness of life in the urban present.

Like Evelyn Waugh, Mr. Amis began as a funnyman and was more generally liked in this earlier pose. But he was always a confrontational comic, a Lenny Bruce: shocking us with our own hypocrisy. The Amis of Yellow Dog and House of Meetings became so confrontational that audiences became a bit timorous. Do we really want to think about the ubiquity of pornography in our lives and minds? What was it that existed in the mental space now occupied by pornography? Even this is more palatable than dwelling on the under-discussed horrors of the twentieth century. Often described as a moralist, Amis is a satirist with no clear didactic purpose. Polemicists excite controversy only when they win adherents. Amis' serious novels have merely taken the joke away from center court at Wimbledon (to borrow a favorite Amis theme) and onto the cement playground courts of other neighborhoods. The author of Yellow Dog, seen by Tibor Fischer as something like an uncle caught masturbating, is not pleasuring himself and making us watch. He is pleasuring us and making us squirm.

There is nothing like the brain-damaged, rampaging hero of Yellow Dog in The Pregnant Widow. Keith, like Charles in Brideshead Revisited or even Nick in The Great Gatsby, is a bedazzled wallflower among the indolent and privileged. His own name and his sister's name are plain, and he and his sister are plain. Their privileged friends, Gloria and Scheherazade, gain stature through the accidental virtues of physical beauty, a palpable and irresistible power. Waking up in this liberated world, or watching this new world awaken, Keith finds himself surrounded by a strange language, startling for its frankness: its concern with body measurements, its judgments about stature and breast and penis size, and its unprecedented behavioral freedoms. Keith complains about the way ladies dress in this world; it shouldn't be allowed! He also finds himself drawn into the preoccupations of privileged youth: with one's own body, with other people's bodies, with the virtues and uses of body parts, the variety of sexual options, and so on. Compared to the novels in supermarkets and drugstores, this book has few depictions of sex but an abundance of meandering and frank conversation. Beneath the badinage, the loosening of traditional behavioral codes, undertaken with such casualness, may be a fission bomb ready to go off beneath the peaceful villa, and Keith, barely a contender in this sexual arena, may be the only one to sense the danger.

The ingénue Keith is not the only traditional aspect of this story. The English country novel is rewritten with its genteel features, especially polite, indirect chitchat, essentially unchanged except by the new conventions of the 1970s. As Keith becomes increasingly infatuated with Scheherazade, his reading, beginning with Pamela and Shamela and moving through Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and so on, parallels the novel's progress through The English Novel. All the elements are there: complex courtship rituals, rich widows, wealthy but troubled male suitors – even Dickensian orphans. English confusion, class affiliations, conflict between love and venality, and ambivalence about sex remain the same even in the "liberated" world of the novel. The sexual shenanigans that remained tacit in the works of Henry James are occurring, mainly offscreen, here, but Keith remains a figure like Strether in The Ambassadors: perpetually confused, inquisitive, and terminally titillated.

This changes along with the novel's pastoral feel when Keith has a transforming sexual experience, a confrontation with brutish physicality. At this point, the values, manners, and attractions that possess the minds of self-absorbed youth are replaced by the urgent bewilderment of fledgling adulthood. Unprepared for the carnality he now inhabits, Keith rewrites his story in a modernist mode, and launches into a confused and ethically questionable series of encounters. Keith's sister, Violet, is similarly overmatched by the demands of the body, from which social conventions no longer shield the youth of the time, and, as the progress of the story shows, suffers a greater penalty for her innocence.

Is Amis writing about his sister Sally, who seems to have followed a broadly similar path? Is he saying that the sexual revolution was harder on women or shouldn't have happened at all? Like other comedians, Amis subordinates viewpoints and autobiographical sources to the exigencies of his craft. Throughout The Pregnant Widow, Keith's unpreparedness for a world he experiences as shockingly visceral echoes the novelist's distance from the brick-and-mortar events evoked in his text.

He stumbled and then steadied. Ever since his arrival, four days ago, Keith had been living in a painting, and now he was stepping out of it. With its cadmium reds, its cobalt sapphires, its strontian yellows (all freshly ground), Italy was a painting, and now he was stepping out of it and into something he knew: downtown, and the showcase precincts of the humble industrial city. (11)

Whether he interprets the fresh hell in which he has found himself as a novel like Clarissa or a canvas by Delacroix, Keith must approach life through aesthetic media. Even words like "downtown" are comfortable labels rather than place markers for an urban world a figure like Keith may actually inhabit. Is it his lack of privilege, either socially or in the looks department, that accounts for his detachment? We can't be sure, but we are nonetheless struck by the way Amis' wordplay, often described (even by his father, another great satirist) as self-indulgent, are integrated into the narrative consciousness guiding us through The Pregnant Widow. Even when the voice is that of an author given to discursive asides, these asides are on the subject of language as it is sometimes used. This language is something like the Potemkin Village of our minds concealing an inconceivable state of affairs.

Vital statistics. The phrase originally referred, in studies of society to births, marriages, and deaths. Now it meant bust, waist, and hips. In the long days and nights of his early adolescence, Keith showed an abnormal interest in vital statistics; and he used to dream them up for his solitary amusement. Although he could never draw (he was all thumbs with a crayon), he could commit figures to paper, women in outline, rendered numerically. (10)

Surely every adolescent is interested in statistics? No, but the inevitable curiosities accompanying adolescence are translated in Keith's mind into the language of the time, the measurements from Playboy and 1950s beach movies. The sophisticated obsessions of older youth merely exacerbate Keith's adolescent confusion, turning puberty into a math game. The passage shows Amis' ability to articulate the line between public language and its private uses, which often confound public intents. In later life, Keith remains troubled by a shifting lexicon.

When he was young, people who were called stupid and crazy were stupid and crazy. But now (now he was old) the stupid and crazy were given special names for what ailed them… He noticed that even the kids' stuff got special names. And he read about their supposed neuroses and phantom handicaps with the leer of an experienced and by now pretty cynical parent. I recognize that one, he would say to himself, otherwise known as Little Shit Syndrome. (3)

Keith's skepticism about psychological labels aside, his point of view throughout the novel highlights its true theme: the obfuscation of pressing realities and necessities of life by our preoccupation with verbal conceits.

Like earlier English novelists, Amis highlights the distinctions between the surfaces of language as used and the underlying psychological and physical realities. However, he treats this novel theme in a unique way through the topic of the sexual revolution. His story suggests this revolution was not a true liberation, merely a renegotiation of our verbal habits as they apply to sexuality. This shift had its consequences on behavioral norms, to be sure, with which some characters were ill-prepared to cope. It may be that the old English hypocrisy about the facts of life at least helped maintain some prophylactic social structures and behavioral strictures.

Now, that's not good or bad: it's something to think about. Amis' recent novels give us that opportunity. However, like some of the characters in the book, many of us can't get past all the dirty words. We have more in common with their gossipy mentality than we ever knew.

How to Water God's Garden
The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

In her latest two novels, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Atwood returns to speculative fiction, extrapolating upon current trends in everything from entertainment to ecology. In the now familiar "not-so-distant-future" Biotech Corporations have replaced governments, the border between wealthy and poor is vast and heavily guarded, and our relationship to Nature has been corrupted through bioengineering. The poor or pleebs live in work at SecretBurgers or sell their bodies, coated in fabricated scales, at Scales n Tails while the rich live on HelthWhyzer compounds guarded by the CorpSeCorps, developing drugs to extend their lives while mounting occasional forays into the pleeblands for a taste of radical chic.

The campy quality of her Atwood's lexicon acknowledges the absurdity of the situation and honey coats the bitter political pill that might cause some readers to cough up the work and dismiss it as propaganda. But these twinned novels (Atwood described them as simultanials) have a more complex delivery system than a typical work of speculative satire. The dichotomy between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the powerless, is clear in both the narrative structure and the language, but the levels of ethical liability and the potential application to our own world is left to the reader. The question raised here is not, "How can we avoid this fictional future?" but rather "How did we arrive at this very real present?"

Snowman narrates the first novel in the diptych, Oryx and Crake. He is a Caliban figure who believes himself to be the last man on earth after the pandemic known as the Waterless Flood has swept over the planet. Atwood intersperses Snowman's struggle to maintain his sanity and fulfill his role as the caretaker of the genetically engineered humanoids, the crakers, with flashbacks of his previous life as Jimmy. The self-absorbed son of a HelthWhyzer scientist, Jimmy only survives because of his friendship with the Machiavellian genius Crake who is both the mastermind behind the Waterless Flood, and the designer of the crakers.

Hierarchy could not exist among them... there was no territoriality... they ate nothing but leaves and grass... theirs sexuality was not a constant torment to them... there would be no family trees, no marriages and no divorces... they would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money.

The Crakers (imagine humanoid smurfs) are crafted using the same bioengineering that precipitated the crisis and conjured up from the same hubris that led humanity to its destruction, but that irony is lost on Crake who is depicted as borderline autistic-a Mr. Spock uncomfortable with the aspects of humanity that make us vulnerable, especially love. In the tradition of great tragedy it is Crake's love, or irrational sense of possession (as he describes it), for Oryx that triggers his internal meltdown, which releases the flood.

The first novel (only because it was released first) is primarily concerned with masculine pathologies and the mechanisms through which they are expressed through digital media and embodied in corporations. Atwood is concerned with how institutions promote and justify the space between the poor and the rich, men and women, humanity and nature. These dichotomies shape the form and mark the content of these partnered novels.

If I have failed to mention the lone female protagonist, Oryx (the focus of a doomed love triangle), it is because she remains a cipher for both Jimmy and Crake-a girl/woman who folds herself into whatever shape necessary to fill the emotional vacuums of the two damaged men.

If we were curious about how the other half lives while reading Oryx and Crake, we had to wait for the release of The Year of the Flood to discover that the other half is barely surviving. Toby and Amanda, two very different women, alternate the narration, as they describe the traumatic path that lead them to God's Gardeners and through the waterless flood. God's Gardeners is a Quaker-inspired, radical environmentalist movement whose members refer to one another as Adam and Eve. Excerpts from their Oral Hymnbook are threaded throughout the novel (they were performed live during Atwood's book tour), as are letters from their leader, Adam One, to his flock:

Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a Species? We have taken the world given to us and carelessly destroyed its fabric and its Creature... No, my friends. It is not this earth to be demolished: it is the human species.

As this excerpt implies (despite its Saganesque cadence). God's Gardeners are not the peace-loving hippies they appear to be. One of the many linkages between these two novels is the relationship between Adam One and Crake: the utopian idealist and the clinical pragmatist. Their conversations occur, like much of the macro-level decisions, off camera. Our narrative view is from below where history is lived, not written.

Toby and Amanda meet as teacher and student among the God's Gardeners. Amanda and the other students refer to Toby as the "dry witch" for her presumed asexuality, while Amanda finds her sexuality to be a double-edged sword. Her path crosses Jimmy's when, early in the second novel, he breaks her heart at the Martha Graham Academy for the Arts. It's the only school he could get into; she is a scholarship student. In this particular collision, she comes away worse for wear. The lives of both women are littered with incidents of abuse and manipulation at the hands of damaged men. Atwood doesn't seem to judge their character, but she does question their privilege to impress their pathologies upon the less powerful and continue on as if it was simply the way of things.

There is something implausible and claustrophobic about this tight web of relationships, as if the death of humanity were being played out on a tiny, off-off Broadway stage. I had difficulty visualizing the city and perceiving what might be going on in the rest of the world. The limited scope is clearly intentional, but the best of speculative fiction provides the right economic, political and social details, without calling attention to them, so the reader has enough material to construct a satisfying scaffolding of the world's architecture. This may be a comment on our limited range of view and a decline in communal experience despite the championing of the web as universal, egalitarian space.

Jimmy, Amanda and Toby all float though the Waterless Flood in protective bubbles: Amanda in the Sticky Zone at Scales N Tales, Toby at the AnooYoo Spa, and Jimmy in a laboratory airlock. Inside the bubbles the characters experience the pandemic much as most Americans experience wars, earthquakes and pandemics. They watch it on television. Unfortunately, these bubbles, like all bubbles, are temporary and when they are forced to leave their safe zones they discover an inhospitable wasteland, overrun by bioengineered wolvogs and escaped painballers-the fruit of science and war.

The Year of the Flood feels more real, more human, than Oryx and Crake. The world that Crake and Jimmy inhabit in the first novel feels more like a bubble than a world, and the "real world" from their perspective, feels more virtual than real. While the gap between the powerful and the powerless expands, the border between the real and virtual becomes more porous. The violence and rape in the Year of the Flood is visceral and jarring. It is meant to awaken the empathy that Crake and the men who control our institutions are incapable of (consider Cheney's smirk).

The abuse that both Toby and Amanda endure brings into relief the dichotomy between the protagonists of the two novels. In the first novel we experience the arrogance and unconscious privilege of the aristocracy, and in the second work we meet its twin-the sublimated rage of the oppressed.

It seems that only the crakers, in their programmed inhumanity and semi-divine "otherness" might be able to return the mantle of humanism to the world. The culminating scene, like the ending of many post-apocalyptic narratives, leaves the question open as to whether the survivors might be able to redeem themselves, and by extension, our planet. Perhaps, as in much of Humanistic thinking, the real project is internal. Perhaps our cumulative personal transformations might be enough for collective redemption. It is now, as in the end, all about ourselves.

Review by Alexios Moore

Women Up On Blocks by Mary Akers
Reviewed by Stephen Page

The female protagonists in Mary Akers's collection of short stories, Women Up On Blocks, live maledominated lives. They feel trapped, yet are in the situations they are in because of decisions that they made during certain periods of their lives.
The first story, Medusa Song, begins as a story of child neglect:

She scrambles the eggs while the baby howls at her knees. To drown out the racket, she hums and jabs the fork into the yolks... then does a quick sidestep when the baby lunges for her knees.
His little fat hands grasp the air, throwing him off balance. He totters on his heels for a moment then sits hard and rolls back sideways, bumping his head on the floor. He stops crying abruptly and flails his arms in the air like a bug stuck on its back.

The neglect continues: "She's barely gotten the toast buttered when John Junior starts up again. He's poopy, she can see it rimming the edges of his diaper... she carries him out to the pickup and puts him squish onto the seat." The mother-narrator of this story, whose name is Cynthia, justifies her behavior by blaming it on her husband's possible infidelity: "Cynthia can't remember when things changed. Maybe it was when she suspected John of sleeping with his secretary." By telling the story in the third-person, Cynthia can distance herself from her own monstrosity. She lets the reader know she was wrong for neglecting the child. Cynthia notes that she was submissive to her husband before the baby was born: "John and she never fought before. Well, sometimes, but it was always more of a disagreement and once Cynthia apologized, it would be over." Cynthia, in another attempt to defend her actions and plead forgiveness from the reader, confesses that she was not always a child neglector: "She used to love her life . . . She used to love the feeling of everyone needing her so badly . . . And when the baby fell asleep, she would sit and hold him just as long as he would sleep."

Another story, "Mooncalf," begins with the frightening first line, "How you recognize a monster is dependent upon how you view normality." "Mooncalf" is the tale of Siren, an intelligent woman with cerebral palsy. While she is at college, she believes she is blessed when she meets and marries Chris, a man whom she perceives as good-natured. Soon after they are married, Chris begins to reveal his true character-even when Siren, who speaks in the first person, denies the existence of his temperament, saying, "In our early marriage, I spent my days struggling to fix Chris's meals . . . Chris almost never fussed." Then they have a colicky baby whom they name Jonah (apt because of the wailing). Chris's reaction to Jonah's constant crying is this (speaking to Siren): "Please don't misunderstand . . . I know he is a precious gift . . . But some days I wish it were just you and me, like it used to be." O.K. Reasonably, what parent has not thought this very same thought at least once in his or her early marriage? But not every parent voices this thought, and if one does, the thought usually passes as soon as the words are uttered. Chris's words are a narrative tactic to reveal more of his character, and a foreshadowing technique. Near the end of the story, we find out just what Chris is made of, when in the middle of the night, as Jonah is crying in the other room and Chris is pacing the floors of the house because he cannot sleep, Siren tells the reader:

I awakened, suddenly to the sound of Chris speaking again. His cadence and tone were strange. His voice was breathy and frantic, and held an edge of panic, "Stopstop- stop-stop-stop-stop-stop!" he said. Jonah's cries stilled and I heard the side of the crib go back up . . . I lay there listening hard in the stillness and staring at the blackness of the ceiling. An uneasy feeling curled itself around my insides and tightened.

In the story "Wholesale," a late-adolescent girl with addictive behaviors runs away from home and an alcoholic father. She becomes a drug-addicted young woman and allows men to sexually abuse her in return for her fix. The main character uses drugs and men use her. Akers probably added this story as an allegory-that for some women, attraction to abusive men is an addiction in itself.

The women protagonists in Mary Akers's stories live in worlds dominated by imperfect men, but they are not perfect characters themselves since they chose to be who they are. They are controlled by "monsters," but they have become monsters. Yes, they are victims of circumstance, but they are not quick to choose behavioral change or a way out when they are in cognitive dissonance. Akers sums up the collection in this quote from "Wholesale": " . . . life can be hell. But also that our choices keep us there, or free us from it, according to our actions."

Readers will empathize with this book because the "monster" lives inside all of us. Good people keep that monster in check. Readers will also relate to this book because everyone has had at least one bad relationship in his or her life, or gone through a rough period in his or her long-term relationship. Akers writes well-her dialogue and situations are realistic, she wastes no words, her metaphors are aptly used; she applies good hooks, good foreshowing, good character development; her stories are devastating, stark, not obvious; she has a large, non-pretentious vocabulary; she captures the voice of each character according to his or her socialization and education; she knows just what information is needed and which is not for the reader to comprehend the intent of the story; and she knows how to start and end a story. Group all of these strengths together, and the result is a writer who knows how to write a short story. Akers's can be ranked with Proulx, Hemingway, Carver, and Cheever.

This book is available online at Press 53 at www.press53.com, and at Amazon.com. Akers maintains a Web site, www.maryakers.com, where her biography can be found, as well as a blog at www.maryakers.blogspot.com.

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Demeter is the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and fecundity. She is often depicted in artwork as carrying corn, shafts of wheat, or the horn of Cornucopia (or a combination). She governs harvestable food for the people and plant life for the earth. The myth goes something like this, depending which version of the myth you read: Demeter bears a daughter named Persephone. When Persephone is a young maiden, Hades, the Greek god of the underworld spies her picking flowers in a field of Narcissi. She is humming to herself and roaming about the field without parental supervision. Hades bursts up from the ground and snatches Persephone, descends back to the underworld with her in his arms, and declares her his wife. Demeter, not knowing what happened to her daughter or where she is, searches the face of the earth for ten days with a torch in her hand. Her search is futile, and she is depressed. During those ten days, her wandering and depression result in negligence of the world's crops, which wither. On the tenth day, she discovers that it was Hades who abducted her daughter, and that Zeus, the ruler of the gods, had some hand in the plan. Demeter is irate at Zeus, so she lets the crops and the rest of the world's plant life die; and she promises never to restore fecundity to the earth until her daughter is returned to her. The people on the earth suffer famine, so they no longer pay homage to Zeus. Zeus, an egoist and a clever barterer, strikes a deal between Hades and Demeter-part of the year Persephone will live on earth with Demeter, and part of the year she will reside underground with Hades as his wife (where she is crowned Goddess of the Underworld). Demeter agrees to the deal, but secretly swears that during the months her daughter is underground, the world's crops and plant life will wither and die; and during the months Persephone is on the earth, the crops and florae will flourish. This myth is ancient Greek reasoning for the seasons.

Ivy Alvarez is obviously well read in Greek mythology. In order to know the Demeter and Persephone myth well, one must know many of the other Greek myths. In Mortal, Alvarez updates the Demeter and Persephone myth in a series of poems. A story unfolds between a contemporary daughter and her mother, who are named Dee and Seph. Alvarez refers to the myth numerous times in the poems, but she takes the liberty of revising the myth in many ways. One of those ways is to have Dee abducted by Hades. As Alvarez's story progresses throughout the series of poems, Dee and Seph age, and a major theme of the collection links with the title of the book.

In "a memory of corn" the crops that Demeter governs, the seasons, and the underworld are mentioned:

A sky blue with hysteria, roses blowsy and promiscuous, bees fat-bottomed and buzzing-it is a shaking, baking summer. Dee and Seph eat by the reservoir, the firepit coals sing to the meats roasting above them, which hiss and spit at them. Mother and daughter take a corncob each... the corns' niblets darken in the heat...

In the poem before that one, Seph is born-via cesarean section-and the tale is told from Dee's point of view:

they had to unzip me
to let the cat
out of the bag
blood bathed my belly
thighs
and baby Seph
I stopped counting stitches
forgave the marring
of my clean envelope...

Soon into the collection, we find the traditional Greek myth reversed:

The abduction of Demeter
This time it is Demeter Hades wants. He
drags her through the garden, throws her to
the ground. It opens like a mouth. Grains scatter
from her hand...
...the wet earth swallows...
...Demeter
Disappears. Persephone falls silent, the
garden grows cold...

Alvarez so aptly implements assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme into her poems, they are unnoticeable-yet they add musicality to the poetry. Alvarez's poetic ear is likely innate. Alvarez writes the poems from various viewpoints, which allows the reader an objective omniscience. The wonderful thing about this collection is that even if you are not familiar with Greek mythology, you can appreciate the book for its high-quality poetry, and the story for its narrative arc.

A Web site for Mortal can be found at www.ivyalvarez.com. The Web site for Red Morning Press can be found at www.redmorningpress.blogspot. com, and the book can be purchased from Amazon.com or from Small Press Distribution at www.spdbooks.org.

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