Batykefer, Erinn. Allegheny, Monongahela. Los Angeles, CA: Red Hen Press, 2009.

Erinn Batykefer’s Allegheny, Monongahela may be her first collection of poetry, but it displays a mastery of form and content that underscores the awards and publications listed in the book’s acknowledgements. “Dog Poem” begins the collection with an image of what it means to be a poet: “I’ve been known to drag old bones with me for miles./If I bury them, the only question is how long/ till I’m clawing the ground to feel them under my teeth again.” From there Batykefer launches into explorations of death, love, and identity. While the collection features some more open poetry, Batykefer’s talents shine brightest when working in the formal modes. The sonnets “Red Hills with White Cloud,” “Pittsburgh as Self-Portrait I & II,” and “Haute Couture” demonstrate that the poet is comfortable working within the strictures of the form but also feeling the freedom to stretch the edges of the form to meet the poetic needs of the material. “Allegheny Love Letter” teems with earthy anthropomorphic imagery that sketches not only the many moods of the mighty river but also provides a chilling profile of the kind of love that cannot help but destroy the beloved. The most successful of the free verse works dwells on an extended anatomical metaphor to describe the speaker’s experience with opera—“The palate lifts like a curtain; the skull a dome for resonance.” This is not the only poem to dwell on what is going on under the skin of the body. “X-Ray” describes the portrait produced by the medical device, while “Horizontal Horse’s or Mule’s Skull with Feather” evisions a future “When my face is scoured clean, sun-whitened, / when my vulgar skin has been stripped / from my body.” “Egyptology” outlines the mummification process “because grief requires compartmentalization.” Lest you think that Batyfefer’s collection is nothing but dark tropes, “Heirloom Recipe” provides a touching—not sentimental—tribute to the power of a peach cake to remind us of our history. While Allegheny, Monongahela does have its weak spots, the delights far outweigh them.

March, Stephen. Strangers in the Land of Egypt. Sag Harbor, NY: The Permament Press, 2009. Available May, 2009.

There’s much to like in Stephen March’s Strangers in the Land of Egypt. The protagonist is that likable high-schooler who somehow is much more self-aware and wise than his peers but who still has lots to learn. The crises in the story don’t stretch our credulity. And the epiphanies in the end are profound, but they don’t promise to solve everything in a neat little package.

What keeps me from loving this book is that it doesn’t seem to know who its audience is, whether it’s aiming for a traditional Young Adult crowd or a literary adult audience. It’s the difference between Cecil Castellucci’s Beige or Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl and Robert Clark’s Love Among the Ruins, between a coming of age story in which the narrator is developing along with story and one in which an adult narrator—with adult understanding—looks back on youth. Where this comes out most strongly to me is in the exposition. After passages of deep understanding probing the emotions and psyche of our main character, we’ll get expositions of the basics of Judaism or the Holocaust that might be fitting in an After School Special. Castellucci’s Katy learns things she doesn’t know in natural interactions with her environment; Jesse listens to the kind of lectures I’d like to give the teens in my life but know they’ll never hear.

Blurbs pasted on the back of my reviewer’s copy praising March’s previous work claim that “March has successfully captured the feel of Southern angst as only…Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor can.” I generally ignore blurbs, and its probably unfair to compare anyone living to the crown royalty of Southern fiction. I can certainly see how an overzealous blurber could make the connection. Does Strangers feature an agnostic protagonist being confronted with a moment of supernatural grace? Yes. Does the story take place in a small town where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a colorful backstory? Yes. But for my money, this town could have been placed in any of a number of struggling Northern towns. Maybe the hegemony of consumerism has erased some of the unique qualities that made the South of Faulkner and O’Connor distinct from the Hawthorne’s New England or Sandberg’s Chicago.

I began this review saying there’s much to like in Strangers in the Land of Egypt. What made me keep turning the pages was the developing relationship between a self-aware, clueless boy and an odd Jewish Holocaust survivor. That Jesse (as in “the tree of”) is redeemed by the ministrations of a man named Ebban, the helpful stone carved with holy text, perhaps puts too fine a point on the transformation of the teen, but it is perhaps the only heavy-handed aspect to a subtle conversion in which we don’t see a fully renewed soul but rather a man set on the path of grace.

Brown, Cecil. The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. 1969. Berkeley, CA: Frog Books, 2008.

“All the publishers are interested in selling books and if you say something about sex and being a nigger then you got a bestseller” (206).

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today’s impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person’s shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown’s classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I didn’t want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60’s Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington’s encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering “What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?” When Washington realizes that “everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides” (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where “the battleground is a bit more familiar” (206). (more…)

Keats, Jonathan. The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six. Random House, 2009. $13.00

When one reads “modern-day fairy tales for grown-ups, reimagined from Jewish folklore” on the back of a book, one is prepared for ironic tales in which that which we see the good side of the bad. We’ve been prepared for these ironic fairy tales from the spate of post-modern spate of books that tell us that what we’ve been shown thus far isn’t the whole story. What I wasn’t prepared for in Jonathan Keats’s The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six was the storyteller pushing through the idea that irony is good for its own sake to show us the truths that irony reveals in its opposition.

Tet the Idler, who lives in a world without sleep, not only discovers the value of rest, but in doing so, he also rediscovers the joy of work. Dalet the Thief, whose thieving becomes toothless when the traditional items he steals lose their worth in a booming and developing economy, returns the town to their humanity by stealing those baubles by which the neuveau riche now measure their worth. And so it goes in each of the 12 tales.

The tales are framed with a mysterious tale of a student collecting these stories of secret Jewish saints. Sounding almost Buffy-like, we’re told that in every generation there are 36 saints roaming the earth. The catch is that the saints don’t know it. The narrator suggests that it is in the “quotidian” that we find holiness rather than in the special. The tales themselves suggest that not only is holiness found in the quotidian but also that it is found in those who do not seek it. None of the protaganists know that they are saints nor are they much interested in seeking out spiritual truth. Each blithely goes about their lives simply trying to live. It is as they try to make sense of thier lives that their search reveals to their communities the truths they didn’t know they sought.

Performing this sort of ironic morality instruction would be engaging in a single story, but Keats pulls off a thoroughly wondrous set of 12 tales, each one rendered in a natural voice that while echoing the patness of a fairytale never condescends to either the material nor the reader. While the inclusion of only 12 tales in a book whose subtitle is “Tales of the Thirty-Six” may smack of marketers setting up a sequel, it’s a sequel I would gladly welcome.

Not only am I proud to be a college professor, I’m also proud to be friends with college professors. None more so than my good friend Ken Morefield.

Having had to deal personally this semester with the negative stereotype the Evangelical sub-culture has of my profession, I’ve also had to deal with the more general negative views of my profession that permeate our culture. It is, therefore, with gratitude that I now plug Ken’s new article published by The Matthew’s House Project.

Thanks, Ken for doing the hard work of intelligently addressing the irrational. And thanks to The Matthew House Project for publishing it.

Special thanks to Grammar Girl for pointing out the diagrammatic sentence stylings of Kitty Burns Florey as she analyzes the sentence structure of Sarah Palin.

After one particularly gnarled sentence, Florey comments

To me, it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (“with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push-buttons.

To be fair, Florey does grant that

diagramming usually deals with written English. We don’t expect speech to reach the heights of eloquence or even lucidity that the written word is capable of…But they’re also forced, from time to time, to answer questions, and their answers often resemble the rambling nonsense, obfuscation, and grammatical insanity that many of us would produce when put on the spot.

At any rate, it’s nice to see a grammarian getting some face-time in these fractious times.

One evil deed missed is a loss for all eternity.
–Grendel

Before Wicked turned Oz on it’s head and explored the life and times of the West’s wickedest witch, there was John Gardner’s Grendel. The 1971 novel by America’s moral fictionist delves into the mind and life of English literature’s earliest monster.

It’s not an easy task. Whereas Gregory Maguire was tackling an essentially human character and writing in a time when pop-psychology family dynamics provide all sorts of explanations as to why the Wicked Witch is so wicked, Gardner tackles a creature only presented as a monster, an animal, a force to be defeated. Interestingly, the one human element provided Gardner by Beowulf is one he discards: Grendel’s mother. She becomes a doddering, dementia-ridden, voiceless, creeping thing in the cave that Grendel finally sets “aside–gently, picking her up by the armpits as I would a child” (158). It’s a sad commentary that the recent Beowulf film adaptation did more of interest with Grendel’s mother than Gardner. To be fair, cast as a first-person narrative, Grendel’s story neccessarily ends before Grendel’s mother really becomes a force in the tale. But the jump from demented hair pile to vengeful she-beast seems a bit much to believe in Gardner’s telling.

Nihil ex nihilo, I always say.
–Grendel

If, as Wikipedia asserts, Gardner was weary of contemporary authors indulging in “‘winking, mugging despair’ or trendy nihilism”, what then does he bring to Grendel? Perhaps it’s a non-trendy nihilism. Or, perhaps, Gardner’s portrait of Grendel is his portrait of contemporary writing: there is no real heroism, there is only power; the self is only defined in pushing against the not-me. Throughout the novel, Grendel seems to ask what it is he is here on earth for, but never really engages in any true searching. His early stumbling attempts at interacting with humans are met with hostility, so he quickly abandons that avenue. The rest of his life therefore becomes a wallowing in a naturalistic, materialistic hell. Is it because of his reception? Is it because of a lack of intelligence?

Whether Gardner is shackled by the source material or a lack of imagination, his exploration into what turns the creature against mankind pales in comparison to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both creatures blame are aware of their evil ways; both creatures blame their evil on the hypocritical failings of humanity; but Shelley is able to scribe that arc with much more precision and pathos. Perhaps Gardner’s choice to write Grendel in first person trapped him in a mind unable to comprehend the metaphysics needed to parse the cruel world in which he’d been set. Or perhaps Grendel is, in the end, nothing more than a physical manifestation of the nihilism described by O’Connor’s Misfit: No pleasure but meanness.

I generally think that the writing in our nation’s newspapers is abysmal and contributes to the destruction of knowledge in the hearts and minds of the average American. However, a recent Associated Press news story does more than the usual to illustrate how the pervasive “style” of journalistic writing not only shades meaning but also entirely convolutes the facts of the story.

The July 12th report of a boy who was struck by a foul ball at a Cubs game carries the headline:

Boy fractures skull after hit by ball at Cubs game

The first sentence of the short article begins:

Doctors and family members say a 7-year-old boy who fractured his skull when he was struck by a foul ball at Wrigley Field…

Look at those sentences carefully. How exactly was the boy’s skull fractured? Did the boy purposefully bring his head into contact with a batted ball? Did the boy through a fit after missing a foul ball and smash his own head into the ground? Did the boy, in fact, have anything to do with the fact that his skull is now fractured? No. But the AP seems to think that the boy did all the fracturing. Why else would you write “a 7-year-old boy who fractured his skull“?

I understand the AP’s desire to write in the active voice. In fact, I generally encourage my writing students to write in the active voice and avoid the passive. However, an overzealous and context-insensitive application of the rule has a negative effect on the goals of AP style. Dr. Michael Sweeny of Utah State University suggests that the unstated logic behind the AP style is:

1. Totally accurate.
2. Totally clear to anyone with a high school education.
3. As tight as can be, given No. 1 and No. 2.
4. Inoffensive, unless there is an overriding reason, central to a significant news story, to include potentially offensive words or concepts.

The AP story headline “Boy fractures skull after hit by ball at Cubs game” violates dictum #1. The boy didn’t do any of the fracturing. The ball fractured the boy’s skull. More accurately, the ball batted foul by Cubs pitcher Ted Lilly fractured the boy’s skull. By casting the sentence in the active voice with the boy as the main subject, the writer makes the boy culpable in his own injury. Surely that is not an accurate representation of the facts.

I’m sure someone could argue that being entirely accurate in this case is going to result in a sentence in which the active agent is not a person–A foul ball fractured the skull of a young boy. Shouldn’t the news story be focused on the boy? Yes, it should. Which is why the passive voice may be the best option in this case. Especially if the acting agent is included. A young boy’s skull was fractured by a foul ball. It may be in passive voice, but the young boy is up front in the sentence and the proper cause of the fracturing is represented.

I could rail about some narrowly focused style hound in the bowels of the AP whose myopic application of a guideline has not only obfuscated the truth but also placed implied blame on an innocent child. But the sad truth is that I’m guessing that this error didn’t require any such threatening visage. My guess is that the piece was written by some poor lackey who has had the rules beaten into his soft, malleable brain-mush and probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference even if he’d had a free-thinking neuron capable to notice what was going on.

Hillstrand, Andy, Jonathan Hillstrand, and Malcolm MacPherson. Time Bandit: Two Brothers, The Bering Sea, and One of the World’s Deadliest Jobs. New York: Ballantine, 2008. $25.

I have an image in my head of Malcolm MacPherson sitting at a table surrounded by piles of audio-cassettes and notebooks, head in hands as he tries to figure out what in the world to do with the hours of anecdotes, stories, histories, and process explanations that he has just collected in conversations with the Hillstrand brothers. That MacPherson was able to find a central narrative on which to hang all of these baubles is not as impressive as his ability to maintain a lively voice for each of the brothers.

Not having cable, I haven’t had the pleasure of watching the Discovery Channel’s show Deadliest Catch. After reading Time Bandit, I’m not sure that I need to. MacPherson uses the narrative of Jonathan’s rescue from being adrift alone during a salmon fishing run to organize the biography of these life-long fishermen as well as a brief lesson in the history and mechanics of crab fishing in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. While the stories are told with first-person immediacy, the book doesn’t lose the narrative drive like the disappointing Jorgy. While some chapters may go on a bit, the overall rhythm of switching from Jonathan’s narrative to the related tales and obeservations is generally effective. The suspense of Jonathan’s situation carrying you over the wave ahead.

The “as told to” approach of Time Bandit robs it of the literary quality of the fisherman/authors collected in Leslie Leyland Field’s anthology Out on the Deep Blue: True Stories of Daring, Persistence, and Survival from the Nation’s Most Dangerous Profession or the memoirs of Linda Greenlaw, but Time Bandit is not simply two old salts telling war stories. Throughout the volume, both Hillstrands reflect often on the nature of humanity that would put themselves through such danger and also on what drives them personally to continue in an industry that will most likely kill them. Their ruminations go beyond hyper-masculine chest thumping to the questioning of human motivation.

At one point describing themselves as dinosaurs, the Hillstrands represent a unique brand of fisherman that was raised with the old, practically unregulated, system and is now transitioning to an era of fishing that is much more controlled by the government. The Hillstrands admit and illustrate the necessity and even effectiveness of the new regulations, but they also fear that the heart of the industry is being eroded by the encroachment of bean-counters and bureaucrats. Time Bandit may then stand as a salt crusted monument to the frontier long after it has been rationalized into the ground.

Rushdie, Salman. The Enchantress of Florence. New York: Random House, 2008.

“Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”

Strangers wearing long leather coats. Mughal kings reigning over an exotic court. Imaginary idealized women coming to life. The glory and intrigue of Renaissance Italy. Boyhood friends coming together for one last crusade. Pirates. Long lost uncles. Dark hints at the origins and demises of figures still casting shadows on contemporary politics. Inquiries into the nature of the self and the divine. Sensuality and sex.

Salman Rushdie’s newest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, certainly has it all. While Ground Beneath Her Feet recast an ancient story in contemporary time, The Enchantress of Florence keeps the setting firmly set in the past while weaving a new story in spaces left vacant by history.

In the 12th century, Genghis Khan united the tribes of northeast Asia and swept over most the continent. In the late 14th century, the Mongol Timur the Lame himself conquered much of central and western Asia. Generations later, claiming descent from both military leaders, we enter the court of Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, known as Akbar the Great. With seemingly little else to do, we meet Akbar worrying about what happens to his identity when talking about himself in the third person. It’s serious discussion he has with himself, but a failure in referring to himself as “I” has ramifications far beyond the immediate uncomfortableness he feels.

The main plotline follows the fortune of a European stranger entering the court with a story to tell. His immediate history is suspect, and it is only his storytelling abilities (and the olfactory wizardry of an unlikely prostitute) that keep him from certain doom. Calling himself the Mughal of Love, the stranger claims a blood relation to Akbar. On the one hand, such a blood relation could solve the problem of Akbar having to pass his kingdom on to unworthy sons. On the other hand, the stranger’s story of proof opens many doors of hidden family history that are both unproovable and inconvenient.

It is the stranger’s story that makes up the second major thread of the narrative. Like Scheherazade, the stranger’s tale is told to save his life, for, having claimed kinship to Akbar, his life would be forfeit should he be unable to proove his claim. And also like Scheherazade, the stranger’s tale weaves together real history, fantastic adventure, and glorious romance. The tale concerns three friends of Florence, one of them the famous Machiavelli. One friend travels the world and becomes a fearsome warlord. One friend climbs the political ropes of power. One friend travels nowhere and lives a simple life until his last great adventure.

Rushdie’s brand of magical realism has the odd quality of simultaneously engaging you in a narrative you think should be interesting and distancing you from that very narrative. Told like a fairy tale, the tone constantly reminds you that you are reading, and that reading is an artificiality. However, ever mindful of the artifice, the reader then constantly wonders, what purpose then did the maker have in mind? Thus, along the way of this intertwined story, we begin to pay close attention to the asides discussing the way of kings, the place of lying, the role of religion, the truth of power. Like the religious pilgrim, it’s no good mindlessly entering the temple and going through the motions. You, dear reader, must work out the value of journey.