Phil Harrison "The First Day": Book Review

Samuel Orr preaches on East Belfast's streets. There "he spoke only the scripture, no commentary, no opinion, no interpretation. No pleading." On the south side of the city, another resident elaborates on her chosen texts. She pursues another Samuel, surnamed Beckett. Anna Stuart "lectured her groups of avid nihilists while looking" from her classroom high up among the red-brick facades of Queens University, "at people scurrying far below, like insects." Phil Harrison sets up his protagonists as he begins The Third Day. His examination of faith and the tensions it creates and confronts engage the reader who enters into this novel. An award-winning filmmaker, he turns to fiction for his print debut.

As a Belfast native, Harrison scrutinizes "a city without roots." Rather than drawing sustenance from the earth, this place rejects security. "Flags, history, tradition, they all take light from the world and bury it." Where this perspective emanates from is not clear. Beginning in 2012, the setting for this story sours its residents. Those raised by the "1986 generation of nay-sayers" of "No Surrender" grow up "just as militant, though with less to lose. A decade of unimaginative leadership, of reconciliation attempts built around 'telling your story', served for the most part merely to trap people in the failed myths they'd grown up with rather than encouraging them to abandon them for bigger, messier ones."

This judgment resonates. Its speaker will be revealed as another victim of this entrapment as it passes down from the sins of the fathers. The stories told by this voice fill in much, but not all. Limits to complete understanding persist, in the city and in Orr's family. For quite a while, readers may remain unaware of who narrates, nearly omniscient, during much of the first half. Harrison slows this pace.

An authorial decision which may startle some embeds itself in the early prose. For the King James Version in all its poetry and power flows through Samuel Orr by habit and by vocation. His stream of consciousness fills with biblical cadences, verbatim from the Good Book. Orr, as a congregant regards him, "seemed to have an ability to make it all about him, to turn the scriptures into biography." Furthermore, the listener to Orr's sermon observes, that obdurate lay minister "yet did not actually do anything; he merely refused to change, to be anything other than his flawed, blunt self."

Like many an Ulsterman, Orr resists sentiment. Harrison keeps him at a distance. Orr's his most potent presence, and when he recedes, his creator plays it safer. Anna's predicament moves Orr, first to passion but soon to estrangement. Their son, also christened Sam (the triple nod to this prophetical nomenclature makes one wonder how necessary is this choice by the writer), must deal with his brother by Orr's wife, twelve-year-old Philip. (The author gives this foil his own first name.) That older boy is saddled with a burden. His father's actions in engendering a sibling only half a brother rankle Philip. He, the narrator defines, "became continuation, the past blurred into the present." Here, the predicament of many in the Irish North hardens the young as it has the old for centuries. "It was like the story they told children: if you pull a face and the wind changes direction it stays that way forever." Philip's determination to thwart both his father and the lad he has produced creates the story line which takes three-quarters of these pages to work itself out. This presumes a reader's patience.

For Harrison resolves to move Philip into a key scene which will effect the narrator and this account.
As with the naming Harrison chooses to grant central characters in The First Day, so with this pivot. It smacks of too-neat a scheme. Perhaps in film this could be carried off adroitly. In fiction, it calls attention more to the author than his antagonist. However, the narrator does reveal necessary sentences (in more ways than one) necessary for the scheme to be at all credible. "Philip had an extraordinary skill of carefully unpicking a person's weakness, of paying attention as much to what they didn't say as to what they did." He teases out the repressed and unravels what others labor to hide. "And he had that rare absence of compassion, a preparedness to use whatever he could get his hands on for his own ends." Certainly this foreshadowing follows through on that narrator's portent.

The crux lies in the ability of Philip to convincingly carry off what Harrison wants him to see through. Orr opines that his older son's "genius" evinces itself by Philip never stepping out of his role. He's "like a method actor who finishes work on a film and forgets to return to his normal life."

The novel's later half shifts the chronology thirty-five years later. Surprisingly, The First Day does not attempt to create a future New York City much altered from today. Gentrification turns into its own parody; artisans consume themselves. This may have already happened, one may aver, by 2012.

As a museum guard, the narrator inhabits a potentially rich setting for an inventive storyteller. Phil Harrison, once more, does not attempt to expand this as much as readers might expect. Instead, the narrator has to "find my own corners, my periphery." He rationalizes this as a better option to the dour conditions which have dampened his upbringing. "Darkness as character--the unknown not as absence but as a space to grow into." These marginal haunts, inevitably, echo those of Sam Beckett.

The First Day succeeds when it plunges Orr and Anna into their own Irish-based predicaments. When the narrative resumes across the ocean, it diffuses. Family secrets, betrayals, punishment and redemption add up to familiar tropes. The promise of the opening chapters, full of the addled and stubborn Orr's KJV compulsions to channel the prophets, and Anna's desperate confusion as she faces the joys and sorrows of motherhood, fades. The narrator trots adroitly at its start. When the story turns to New York, too much has been left unsaid and hidden for its revelations to excite its readers. What could have accelerated into a dynamic climax idles and glides into too rapid a resolution.
(NYJB 10/24/17)

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E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime": Book Review

No, I never saw the 1981 movie. And after sampling the author himself reading the audio version in a surprisingly perfunctory, even dull, manner, I opted for the book on a recent flight to New York. The story rushed past, and as I was using a Kindle, I had no idea that the novel would finish so rapidly. I felt I was halfway through when suddenly, the characters were all wrapped up and the ending loomed. Like the audio, it's itself perfunctory in places, and it felt as if E.L. Doctorow wanted it over.

Looking back forty-plus years, this 1975 novel feels a bit dated. Of course, it's an historical narrative dramatizing real life characters such as Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw, Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, and a bit of Sigmund Freud and Booker T. Washington in cameos. This is mixed with parallel stories of a Jewish immigrant and his daughter, and the "Younger Brother" of a scion of a flags and fireworks manufacturer in New Rochelle, NY. Yes, it's a bit of an easy target for Doctorow, and like the incorporation of the Coalhouse plot that sparks the action, these themes carry a counterculture air of disdain and dismissal for the American dream and its first takers.

The immigrant vs. Yankee, white vs. black, Irish vs. everyone else tensions permeate these pages. It reads well, but the sour authorial tone dampens enjoyment. Doctorow wants us to criticize the wealthy and while this may be an admirable sentiment then as now, the intrusive voice (which in other novels I do not mind necessarily) grates now and then. He keeps a distance between us and the characters, so the events feel more staged than organically motivated. as if to exemplify class struggle. This suits the 1902-1912 focus, but when towards the conclusion, other noteworthy struggles crowd in, the pace alters and one can sense Doctorow's manipulation and compression.

If he'd taken his time in the latter portions, it might have resembled the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos even more than it certainly does, especially in the Younger Brother's picaresque itinerary. Doctorow starts this part off inventively, but he then crams in more telling than showing, and the momentum weakens when it should have accelerated after the pivotal New York City showdown.

The mechanical nature of this storyline may result, as a 1998 piece in the Observer reminds readers, from Doctorow's debt to the novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. While Doctorow nods to this source for Coalhouse Walker, it does tip his own reworking of this idea into melodrama, as this Observer critic noted. Like Dos Passos, the machinations of the characters wind up less engaging than the ideas and the milieu depicted, in the early part of last century. (Amazon US 5-30-17)

Lionel Shriver's "The Mandibles": Book Review

After nearly 130 reviews posted [on Amazon US, where this appeared 9/28/16], mine will not rehash much of the story. I like Lionel Shriver's little-known novel on the North of Ireland and while her take on obesity in Big Brother was less successful, I admire her willingness to immerse herself, whether the theme is snooker, bicycling, tennis, or a child who is a bit of a problem. So, as a fan of dystopias, I wondered how she'd handle the near-future economic meltdown of the Renunciation.

Turns out she puts enormous paragraphs in the mouths of not only the put-upon Georgetown professor of economics, but a teen prodigy. They wind up having to explain theory and practice of the "dismal science" to the family, which grows as hard times fall and never ebb in 2029. Shriver tackles the misanthropy and growing chaos well, if from the perspective of a hard-to-like matriarch of a privileged clan in Manhattan. True, pity is needed for those who as the prof notes have more than one pair of shoes, and to her credit, Shriver moves the family tale along rather briskly.

But as the professor lets on early, his pontifications are hard to let go of, and other characters speak like educated folks on paper, with almost no distinction. Only a burst of "black English" by one client of the protagonist of the first 3/4 of the novel seems to come from another class or reality. Still, seeing a New York streetscape where the homeless do include nuclear physicists in fact and not fantasy, and where the street people have their pick of Posturepedic mattresses discarded as the system breaks down and selfishness gives way to brutishness seems to confirm Hobbes.

She gets digs in. No more worries about lactose tolerance, or gender dysmorphia. Or, obesity, in the harsh reality that replaces coddling or comfort.

Oddly, in the last quarter of the book, from the view of a particularly annoying if prescient person, the presumed religious backlash to the surveillance of the resurgent US government is absent. Shriver succeeds as many writers have in showing us the New American Order, but she shrinks from the rural reaction, and her observation of the world outside NYC does not convince. As she divides her time between Brooklyn and London as a longtime ex-pat, perhaps she is too used to reading about her fellow 'Muricans rather than roaming beyond the chattering creative classes she likes to skewer. True, mango-wood side tables won't rouse much of a reaction vs. a 5 lb. bag of rice in 2029 where "dial 2 for English" is the new norm. Her predictions may come true--I fear that of the "cuboids" of dead trees once known as books may be hastened, despite her dire estimation of Amazon itself in this brave new world. Anyone having read Huxley's tale may find The Mandibles an echo, if another uneven message.

Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"You turn into a cipher"

Would you listen to The Bonfire of the Vanities again? Why?

Probably not, but I liked Joe Barrett's reading. It enlivened a book I read when it came out, thirty years ago. But I don't need to visit this story a third time.

Would you recommend The Bonfire of the Vanities to your friends? Why or why not?

For a period piece, a morality tale pre-Internet and social media, it remains a valuable dramatization of the pressure of what the 'flak catchers' Tom Wolfe profiled endured two decades later in the Bronx. This time, it's the legal profession, not the (other) bureaucrats.

What does Joe Barrett bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Having enjoyed his reading of John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany," Barrett here can show off his range of voices and accents as he has many more characters to work with. While the "haw haw haws" on Wolfe's page still grate to the ear here, the verve and pathos Joe Barrett brings to the protagonist, Sherman McCoy, deepens the novel and message.

If you could rename The Bonfire of the Vanities, what would you call it?

"Pin the WASP to the wall"--a phrase used by Sherman's persecutors

Any additional comments?

Ch, 22, a descent from the Dickensian satire into Dantean depths, is harrowing and very well told. One of the longer chapters, but the book generally moves along well. Despite dinner party chat in real time, and those Tom Wolfe elaborations of sartorial and decorative detail. (Audible US 3/5/17)

Randal Doane's "Stealing All Transmissions": Book Review

 
How did the late '70s arrival of The Clash to a nation they loved and who loved them, in Randal Doane's phrase, jostle the privileged perch granted FM free-form radio and long-form rock journalism in American popular culture? Doane attempts to answer this complex topic in a few pages. He matches an affection for what was pitched as "the only band that matters" with a professor's determination to apply theory and scholarship about popular culture to the band's American impact.

FM radio crackled with battles between disco and new wave, Steely Dan or the Eagles. Guitar heroes Van Halen threatened Boston and Kansas. Pre-packaged rock radio in syndication, and then MTV, took advantage of alternative rock trends. The Clash and other punks rallied to break down barriers on air. Doane's examines, circa 1978-81, a brief success by the underdogs against the suits. Even if The Clash was signed to CBS. That band marketed its message as widely as possible. The result (as this reviewer can attest) is that many younger listeners picked up guitars and books, inspired by not only the "molten" noise of early import singles, but the Clash's lyrical range and cultural references.

A dean at Oberlin College, Doane combines academic critique (and its concomitant tendency to lapse into seminar-speak) with livelier glimpses from his formative years as a fan growing up in Stockton, California. He enriches these youthful reminiscences with an imaginative journey. He invents a quest narrative, following the figures narrated over four sides of London Calling as that album's storyline follows dreamers and schemers from the band's hometown across the sea to success or failure in Manhattan. (I note as an aside that the first box-set retrospective issued by the band is called Clash on Broadway, a location which fits both London and New York City, even as it emphasizes the latter.)

Doane straddles the boundaries between fan and critic throughout this study. He analyzes the music industry as a Clash historian, and as an often discrete investigation into the state of American rock radio in the 1970s. He documents the struggle on FM stations between AOR, disco, hard rock, and the new wave upstarts. These were often marketed by Sire Records and eager labels, some indie, some subsidiaries of the majors, who allied with the bands which claimed to challenge the system. Of course, they also aspired to chart success and lucrative tours. This bifurcated presentation, by not only the bands in their clash of ambitions but Doane's staggered structure of his chapters between those on The Clash and those on radio, weakens this as a cohesive thesis. However, considering particular chapters apart from this diffused presentation, Doane's attempt to analyze The Clash within an American moment as the 70s leapt into the 80s provides a useful perspective of the band's impact. It draws upon books by Clayton Heylin and Jon Savage, integrating their research with his own predilection for New York City area rock stations. This case study looks into how they did or did not play the Clash, and rivals or colleagues from both local and British punk and new wave scenes.

This book is enhanced by backline roadie Barry "The Baker" Auguste's introduction. He conveys the changing fortunes of a band gradually if seemingly suddenly, for one behind the scenes, lifted from clubs to theaters to arenas by its third album, London Calling. This book does not delve very far into the mid-1980s phase of the line-up. Instead, Doane sticks to the first three albums, and he shows what worked and what did not on the various domestic and import versions of their incendiary self-titled debut, and the more, uh, diverse, follow-up, Give 'Em Enough Rope, produced by Blue Oyster Cult associate Sandy Pearlman. As for the sprawling triple disc, the what to me felt the never-ending experiments of Sandinista!, brisk coverage is given. Doane marvels at it, as diehard fans tend to do.

Tellingly, he offers no real attention to their more mainstream album, the last one with their steadiest line-up, Combat Rock, and none to the album made by Joe Strummer, Paul Simenon, and new recruits to replace Mick Jones and Topper Headon, the widely disdained Cut the Crap. It would have been intriguing to follow the fortunes of the band: their tours, their radio play, and their LP sales. Certainly one wonders how The Clash, once they topped the charts, dealt with their long-term prospects. It's a relevant example of the music industry's own determination to encourage or ignore a band. Yes, the band's saga during their global roller coaster of the 1980s has been covered before. But Doane stops the story early on, preferring to end while the band anticipated greater fame in the U.S. and beyond.

Given this wistful denouement, Doane's study offers a muted celebration and a cautionary tale of how rock radio and promotion U.S. markets tried to fend off, ignore, or embrace us, then-scattered and once few, fans of punk and new wave. Even if the academic tone slows his pace, Doane places The Clash within their attempt to break into the American market. Best of all, his diligence and scrutiny  reminds readers about when such inventive music, combative attitudes, and intelligent lyrics (well, some of the time) mattered for millions of fans growing up then. Today, the hit-and-miss history of the one punk band which made it big as arena rockers endures. And, professors grow up to be fans, or in my case, reviewers. For, the Clash were the first "real" band I ever saw, in March, 1980, at the Santa Monica Civic. They arrived hours late, but nobody (except for punctual me) seemed to mind. (Spectrum Culture 9-7-14)

Molly Crabapple's "Drawing Blood": Book Review

Over a year ago, Vanity Fair published a report from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. Its Syrian correspondent, for fear of his life, remained anonymous. He sent photos of his city via cellphone. From these, the New York City native who goes by Molly Crabapple sketched intricate drawings, in her typical style of gracefully delineated shapes and wavering people. Out of digital images, Crabapple evoked illustrations hearkening back to a Victorian era when artists filled the news with detailed, lively depictions. Yet, Crabapple also infuses her increasingly activist art with innovation.

In Drawing Blood, she narrates, in "sentences at taut as garrotes," her first three decades. For an artist not yet thirty, a memoir may appear precocious. However, she infuses much of her coming-of-age story with fresh insights into the century, so far, from the perspective of a scrappy woman who confronts disorienting scenarios with mixed detachment and sensitivity. "It's a strange blend of disassociation, to stare into another's eyes only to make those eyes into shapes on paper." From an early age, she sketched to escape and to enlighten herself. Born to a Puerto Rican Marxist professor and a Jewish illustrator for children's books and products, she inherited her father's combativeness and her mother's talent. The child of their early divorce, Crabapple found solace in a few friends.

Of one, a Russian immigrant teenager, she recalls their brief bond. "We clung to each other, as bookish young people often do, while waiting out the years until our real life could begin." Schooled more by her self-taught reading in anarchism and the fin-de-siècle and her listening to Kurt Cobain, punk, and Trent Reznor, she soon fled abroad. She followed the route of many bohemian wanderers.

At the end of another century, she faced many restless travelers like herself, seeking meaning in a globalizing realm. In Marrakesh, "the henna looked like Cheetos dust on white girls, but on brown ones it resembled rose petals." Her own appearance, in what she defines as a tiny figure resembling Wednesday Addams, attracted men. Fending them off on the road drove her inward, to examine her fluid sexual and cultural identities. Restive with art school, she sought to make her craft matter.

Post-9/11, she got caught up in anti-war protests. "A painting didn't have to hang in a gallery, dead as a pinned butterfly. It could exist in spaces where people cared, as a mural, a stage set, a protest placard." This sparked her transformation into a noted chronicler of first the visual and later the verbal impacts of our unjust world. She disciplined herself to render these scenes by a crow's quill pen, flicking it "till the ink sped like motion and blood." Drawing Blood features her work, women as coiffured as those at the court of Versailles, wide eyes half-moons, or as louche men slouched slyly.

Tired of conventional training, she drops out of art school. She enters the sex-worker industry, as a artist's model and a burlesque performer. She endeavors, as her stint with Suicide Girls goads her, "to burn off her childhood," although that dubious enterprise "dispensed pallets of ego-crack. We were Pavlov's bitches." Molly Crabapple adopts her persona. With it, she pursues Internet promotion and procures a precarious living as a minor celebrity in the NYC demi-monde. Her lover, Fred, supports her. She indulges in freedom to roam among the company of many other women, as varied partners.

All the same, the middle section of her saga sags slightly. Her fame exudes a telling tinge of disappointment. Her loft and income are not enough. After the 2008 crash, the commissions she craves fade. She contemplates the fate of those like herself who cheered the excess on in Manhattan: "we sparklers illuminating the face of the destroyer." Chastened but not cured, she keeps feeding that beast, as her profits rebound and her reputation becomes internationally coveted. Witnessing London's anti-austerity activists at the end of 2010, she finally vows to pivot away from her status.

Therefore, "instead of taking refuge in a curlicued past," she puts her rococo pen to use. Frustrated by "painting pigs in Nero's nightclub," Crabapple leaves her insular, smug denizens in clubland behind. The radical upheaval of what she enters as the Occupy Movement intrigues her, but typically, she resists easy enchantment. Her characteristic caution, honed during her travels alone in far places, keeps her grounded. She watches how for some, a night in jail or spent in Zuccotti Park leads to book deals. Having scored her own soon after, she resolves that she will listen to those who truly suffer.

At Guantanamo Bay, she undergoes a revelation as she records the fate of a prisoner. She alternates her creation of nine immense canvases satirizing or commemorating the battle over Capital, Shell Game, with reporting for Vice, The Paris Review, and The Guardian. She squirms over her come-hither portrayal in a New York Times profile, and she cross-examines her own complicity in how she markets herself, determined to survive on her own terms in a cruel, competitive art world.

I found the earlier and later chapters of her account the most rewarding. A comfortable career tames her too much. When Molly Crabapple stares down danger and corruption, whether left to her own savvy in a remote setting, or today as she investigates the long reach of terror and greed, she succeeds best. As she sums up, she is driven "to do violence to her own clichés." She learns "to find joy where once I could only see ash." Drawing Blood illuminates the flames and the fire which warms her now.
(Amazon US 12-1-5 and PopMatters 12-18-15)

David Graeber's "The Democracy Project": Book Review

Having found myself intrigued by this anthropologist-activist who was among the first, as he narrates here, to generate the "We are the 99%" slogan and Occupy Wall Street movement, I followed my reading of his dense but not dull academic study of Debt: The First 5000 Years (reviewed by me in April 2014) with his more casual 2013 narrative of OWS, its origins, impacts, and relevance within grassroots, participatory direct action as the genuine democratic exercise of rights. He insists that the lack of a platform or agenda spoke to the Occupy strengths, by its refusal to play into party politics, rather than as a left-wing balance to the Tea Party's anti-government (but less rarely anti-business, at least after the GOP co-opted it, an issue that merits attention more than the aside here, but it may not be that germane in Graeber's view given his anti-corporate as well as anarchist focus). I agree here, even if my friends and media disagree.  Graeber reminds readers that bipartisan "status-quo" presidents no matter their claims for "change" continue to prop up what's broken.

As I've opined often among my pro-Democratic Party friends and family, Graeber raises a critique few leftists promote; they capitulate to the lesser of two evils or "they won't let Obama win" retorts. He castigates the handling of the 2008 crisis with a new president who exhibited "perversely heroic efforts to respond to an historic catastrophe by keeping everything more or less exactly as it was." (95) This can be confirmed by Timothy Geithner's subsequent defense while he promoted his own book in Spring 2014; and by Matt Taibbi's concurrent exposure Eric Holder's role as he kept kid gloves on as he handled "legal justice" for those victimized by Wall Street's banking powers in '08. George Packer finds in his narrative history another pattern of how the law was used to suppress the common folks, buried by robo-signings and instant judgements from judges, not those in charge.

This fits well with these two recent accounts I've studied which address the mess we're in these decades post-Reagan, and all who've succeeded him: George Packer's "The Unwinding" about a disintegration of American stability under the corporate-political oligarchy, and Matt Taibbi's "The Divide" about the refusal of Obama's administration to pursue justice against Wall Street bankers while doggedly beating down and hounding the poor and weak among us who cannot counter the power of the law and order forces, paid by the government which enables these same banks to launder drug money, profit off debtors, expand prisons, and sustain an increasingly unequal economy.

Graeber shows close-up at OWS a common complaint: the "U.S. media increasingly serves less to convince Americans to buy into the terms of the existing political system than to convince them that everyone does." (109) This is a bit too compressed, but his point is that--take Ralph Nader's campaign--that the media portrays such candidates and platforms as is only the 2.7% who voted for him favor them. The media refuse to offer such alternative advocates the opportunity to speak out, and consigns them to the realm of fringe or freakish figures who don't merit the gravitas afforded the Democrats and to a lesser or greater extent depending on the channel chosen, the GOP. Therefore, a false choice perpetuates, and dismissal of spontaneous uprisings that may present a challenge to the parties who persist in representing the 1% more than the rest of us continues. Those who take to the streets or camp out near City Hall or big banks get ridiculed as dangerous bums or deluded rich kids.

While I remain cautious about his claim that over half of all British female students engaged in sex work to pay off tuition and that nearly a third went to prostitution, and his factoid that 280,000 American women with college debt signed up for sugar daddies needs more than one HuffPo citation to sway me, I agree that student debt (I heard recently costs have gone up 1200% since 1978) and the wider indentured status this incurs among many of us cripples us. For degrees are now the ticket into many professions, and that entry fee rises as banks profit off the money they lend to students and their families, continuing to deepen the hold that loans and interest have over many Americans now. Coupled with his own studies and the pressing need for reform or a debt jubilee (as his previous book naturally called for), this does seem a logical stance to take as the issue most needing redress by us.

The trouble is, "corporate lobbying" as he relabels it by its reality as "bribery" stymies progress. Each Congress member needs to raise, he says, $10,000/week from the time he or she is in office to prepare for the next election. Contrary to our national myth that we can separate the system from its overthrow as if we are revolutionaries anew, Graeber contends the economic and political control is so linked now that it cannot be reformed by representatives, complicit in the status quo. He shows how the appeals of the indebted smack of peasants begging for their land and relief from burdens, such is what Americans have been reduced to. As to "white working-class populism," he correctly chides this for its anti-intellectualism, and Graeber to his credit takes a moment to consider the lasting appeal of it for so many. Within its determination to call for liberty, there's "an indignation at being cut off from the means of doing good," within a society bent in equating our life's range with only the satisfaction of our self-interest. (124) People want to achieve for themselves and conduct their own decisions, and not expect the State to cater to all of their needs. A sensitive issue; a commendable insight. This is explored idiosyncratically in James C. Scott's 2013 "Two Cheers for Anarchism."

Midway, Graeber tackles liberal mockery of OWS. He confides that the left as they dominate media tend to project their guilty conscience by their coverage.  "Liberals tend to be touchy and unpredictable because they share the ideas of radical movements--democracy, egalitarianism, freedom--but they've also managed to convince themselves that these ideals are ultimately unattainable. For that reason, they see anyone determined to bring about a world based on these principles as a kind of moral threat." (150) He reminds us that what John Adams feared as "the horrors of democracy" as if anarchy (often a negative term from Plato on) does not negate "core democratic principles," but takes them "to their logical conclusions." (154)  In a truly eye-opening chapter "The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason," he shows Gouverneur Morris, gentry of NYC, witnessing at planning for the Constitutional Congress "butchers and bakers" arguing the merits of the Gracchi or Polybius (a sign of how far we've fallen from a classical education for the masses?).

He cautions those who'd toss bombs or instigate violence, and he shows as in the chapter "How Change Happens" not only the way direct action and affinity groups and peaceful assemblies reach consensus, but he notes in passing the dangers of coercion. The Iraqi Sadrists attempted to form a mass working-class base for self-governance, but the zones they opened with the wedge of "free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers" took on, as they required security, the social apparatus and then political platforms supporting charismatic leaders turned cultural voices in formal institutions.

This book as with "Debt" skips about although it stays animated with Graeber's confident presence. In a few places the style stumbled and careful editing might have smoothed out a couple of rough spots in the prose. I liked the glances at humor as in the Occu-pie pizza, "99 percent cheese, 1 percent pig" provided those at OWS early on. Books on anarchism sometimes need a lighter touch, after all.  And as with other studies, I needed to see how workplace strategies might evolve to prefigure change, in an increasingly unstable and detached electronic and dispersed environment where freer standards may contend against online surveillance, weak wages, globalization, and reductive profit.

He touches on this, however, in "Breaking the Spell" as he glances at the "productivist bargain" that assumes work is a moral good rather than an economic position. He shows if in passing how labor discipline can make one worse, not better, if it does not become virtuous to allow us to help others. Why not make mothers, teachers, caregivers the "primordial form of work" rather than models of production lines, wheat fields, or iron foundries? Mutual creation and a shift, as he admits Occupy might formulate a key demand, to "change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be" is a small step, if one meriting a book and movement of its own. (289)  He tells us how the weight of bureaucracy grew, under capitalism and communism, and how the latter term underlies what society, our circle of friends, our family runs on: amicability, cooperation, practical assistance.

I wish the book, after its vignettes as early on he and a handful of activists met at the Irish Hunger Memorial and then Zuccotti Park to jumpstart OWS, had covered more of the blow-by-blow on the street examples of how consensus might or might not have worked, and how across the world (not only in this perhaps understandably Manhattan-centered p-o-v from one who is based now in London academia after his departure from Yale) people met to for better or worse try to coordinate progress. I saw at the L.A. encampment examples of both, and Graeber appears to gloss over a lot of the mess. It's a mixture: a study of democracy historically and at OWS, and part personal testimony. But this makes it uneven in pacing and scope; it's valuable behind-the-scenes, yet you want to peer in deeper.

In closing, Graeber teaches a different civics lesson. "No government has ever given a new freedom to those it governs of its own accord." (239) Grassroots turn tough. Laws may need to be broken. (Amazon US 6-20-14)

"A Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon": Book Review

This helpful compendium opens up for both specialists and generalists this "difficult" writer's works. It encourages us to enter the discussion about them. My review sums up the contents of a compact but valuable resource. Given that the chronology of Pynchon's life and works by John M. Kraft must be far sketchier than that for perhaps any other living author, Kraft sensibly concludes after summing up what can be verified: "We hardly need to know the life to appreciate the works."

As the introduction by editors Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale reminds us, their "Pyndustry" formed to dissect Pynchon's fiction need not be as hermetic as it may seem to the outsider. "It is the sense of sharing in a collective enterprise of readers that transforms a cult of insiders into a community." With only his works to study, the author absent, we are "left to our own devices". This 2012 anthology aims at fellow academics, but it provides a more accessible guide to the canon, poetics, and issues than monographs devoted to recondite topics.

Part I surveys the canon. "Early Pynchon" by Herman examines the first stories and racial themes and revision in V. It's a limited look at that novel, but many contributors agree that Pynchon's 1963 full-length debut represents but a frenetic trial run for the two "masterpieces" that would follow.

Although dismissed by the author as a misfire, his first, The Crying of Lot 49, appears alongside Vineland and Inherent Vice as a California novel. (Pynchon's newest, Bleeding Edge, reviewed by me in PopMatters and in shorter form at Amazon upon its publication 17 Sept. 2013, burrows into congenial tales of attempts to break out of the "meatworld" and the crackdown that follows not only a counterculture but the start-ups. Bleeding Edge draws Pynchon back from his adopted Golden State to his native New York, but post-9/11, it entangles wired technology hatched and incubated in Silicon Valley.) Thomas Hill Schaub locates "New Age libertarianism" rather than "liberal pluralism" as the Californian novels' political stance. He tracks the "consensus" for the 1964-71 period they evoke. Lot 49 traces a "secret withdrawal" from conformity, appearing in 1966’s flower-power promise. The other two novels track state backlash, and from the rueful benefit of hindsight, they from their publication in respectively 1990 and 2009 lament the passing of communal alternatives and individual initiative during the rise of Nixon and Reagan, as sinister forces regroup to compromise or marginalize those who tried to fight the power.

Gravity's Rainbow is rooted in Pynchon's service to this same state, in his 1960-62 career as a technical writer in Seattle at Boeing. Steven Weisenburger documents Pynchon's role in the bureaucratic complicity that enables the military and such corporations to ally with global economies and murderous technology. Rocket World's domination, in Pynchon's 1973 indictment of mass death, proves how the post-war national security state follows the Second World War's operations, carried out by a "Power Elite's relentless sovereignty". Ethical or practical resistance by a few may be admirable, but given the fate of many in Gravity's Rainbow it appears such stances remain quixotic.

Certainly Mason & Dixon plots this tension between rationalization and imagination, the little guy versus the big picture. This relentless push of modernization and profit, as America championed in colonial times, captures a period which changed "all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments". Such an eighteenth-century style and orthography of this 1997 epic enlivens Pynchon's exploration of another historical epoch. While less immediate than the mid-twentieth century, Kathryn Hume explains, this period also pits protagonists against a world-system of intricate "lines" laid down by mathematicians and surveyors to extend imperialist ambitions. Slavery, mystery, and science contend. Layers and networks, typical elements of Pynchon's fiction, give clues and orient or disorient readers within such complex webs.

Widening the rampage of overlying overlords in Against the Day to roam thirty years around the turn of the last century, the pre-WWI foundation for that similarly immense 2009 send-up of early twentieth-century literary genres defines Menippean satire. Bernard Duyfhuizen tallies 170 characters and at least a dozen pastiches of fictional categories in its sprawl. Its "dime novel" elements involving silent-era film in Los Angeles, as this critic astutely cites, anticipate the cinematic hard-boiled patter and louche gumshoe satire of Inherent Vice set fifty years later on the coast near that same city. They also, typical for Pynchon as his novels unfolded, overlap, as the Traverse family introduced in Vineland edges Against the Day into an earlier work as published, even as it hints ahead via its anarchistic struggles to hippie reactions against capitalism in the California novels, chronologically.

After overviews of the major texts, Part II elucidates poetics. David Cowart's investigation of literary history enlivens the author's promise. "Pynchon seduces the reader with something like the big picture: read this and you'll understand the age and its enormities." Cowart wonders if Pynchon leads the way in innovation, away from modernist tropes, or whether he responds to endemic cultural trends. The evidence marshaled favors Pynchon as leading the way, although Cowart appears to strain credulity when attempting to attribute prescience to the appearance of Pynchon's novels within years or stages of political upheaval or social unrest. What seems more convincing is that by Vineland the quest narrative--however unfulfilled--in his previous novels diminishes amid "increasing difficulty". Pynchon while lightening his tone and intensity somewhat by the 1990s intensifies his range. His target widens as his novels grow encyclopedic. Melville created one such narrative; Pynchon, many.

Delving into theory, the following essays prefer a more professorial, less playful stance. McHale sums up postmodernism adroitly. He links Christopher Jencks' "double-coding" within architectural designs winking at those in the know while delighting or puzzling the general public to Pynchon's blend of high-art themes and pop-culture references. McHale argues that postmodern ontology, a concern with being, replaces the modernist search for epistemology, to address meaning. Cowart concurs that the early quests of V. and Lot 49 have disintegrated by Gravity's Rainbow; that work ends with explosions, dispersions, and reversions. Erasures, forking paths, nesting, layers all fool characters--and any who attempt to navigate and master the labyrinth.

Pynchon's intertexts, as David Seed charts, exhibit their own twists and turns. Characters and themes start to blur and shape-shift. The final essays gathered in Part III under Issues can drift into their own hermetic recesses. Sometimes theory overwhelms the application to specific passages in the texts. If a chapter on humor, which gains all but five citations in the index, might have substituted or supplemented this section, its inclusion would have leavened the seriousness of this section. Pynchon's wordplay, songs, and slang, and his inherent vice that drives him to keep his awful or sly punchlines coming do not earn the depth they deserve here. Amy J. Elias for history, Jeff Baker for politics, Deborah L. Madsen for alterity, and Dalsgaard for science and technology, all the same, offer directions to suggest deeper pursuits for these respectable topics.

In a coda of "how to read Pynchon", Hanjo Berressem notes how readers responded critically during each stage of Pynchon's trajectory. The prophet of doom and miscommunication appeared ready for the Space Age amidst its countercultural flight from the threats "slouching towards universal disorder, heat-death, noise and, ultimately, to near-static". The post-structuralist craze found deconstructionists thrilled with a "violently centripetal" lurch into futility, disorder, and self-referential metafiction. (That may explain at this time my own hesitation to immerse myself, as a grad student, into his works, as they were inculcated as mocking, monolithic, dire, and airless testaments to dead zones.)

By the 1990s, the changes during the Reagan administration may have tempered such critical frenzy. Pynchon's sensitivity to the realities of contemporary life, beyond satire, puns, puzzles, and irony, turned some to reconsider the aesthetic arguments within his novels. The progression in the humanities over the next fifteen years towards New Historicism placed Pynchon's fiction within the "complete counter-history of America" in its mission to (as Mason and Dixon dramatizes) "save the realm of the fictional from the forces of relentless factualization and rationalization". 

Some critics here propose that reading Pynchon, we can follow his example to challenge the system that supplants our initiative with a perpetual commodification of our dreams and desires for fulfillment. Bleeding Edge continues this critique, but it too shrinks back from any clear resolution of its own shaggy-dog plot. Those who seek in Pynchon's passages an escape from their mundane concerns may find that the paths fork and bend back into our own reality with its often elusive lack of lasting satisfaction. Like his protagonists, Pynchon appears to remind us, in his absence from advising us, that we must rely on our own smarts, arrayed against mystery and cynicism and corruption.  As the editors of A Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon conclude in their collective, even utopian, ambition to scope out this reclusive writer's ascent and flight patterns: "We are all in this together." ("Left to our own devices" at PopMatters 2-10-14 and in shorter form 2-14-14 to Amazon US)

Nicholas Delbanco's "Melville: His World and Work": Book Review

Given we know much less than expected about Herman Melville's life, outside of the hints in his own fictional and poetic creations, Nicholas Delbanco's narrative offers a welcome critical biography. He shows us how the works and the man intertwined, and with it, through a life begun in 1819 and ending up in 1991, that dramatic shift from an America with family memories during the Revolutionary War into one with clattering trains and tall buildings accelerating into our own metropolitan rush and clang. A professor at Yale, Andrew Delbanco skillfully argues for Melville as balanced between Whitman's "New York bluster" and his friend Hawthorne's "New England gravity", and as in his increasingly sophisticated and erudite works, how their author learned in New York City, 1847-50, to tell tales that balanced between Romantic-tinged evocations of savagery and the wild, and those which examined the "Enlightenment emissary" sent from the West on a civilizing mission of exploitation and awe.

While naturally "Moby-Dick" is associated most with Melville, and certainly the opening colophons (echoing that novel's own appearance) and pop culture references ("The Sopranos" and Osama bin Ladin, Mad magazine and Ken Kesey, Leslie Fiedler and Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus) that bring us into this study emphasize this well, Delbanco peppers these pages with citations from the whole oeuvre, so we can judge how Melville revealed himself, or hid, within. With most of his manuscripts and correspondence apparently lost, any biography needs to look beyond the standard sources, but Delbanco blends those extant smoothly into his own depiction of 19th century America.

We need reminding that as with "Huck Finn" very little we choose to perpetuate today from that era (outside the classroom) permeates wider consciousness. Melville broke through the barrier (copyright played a role in pumping up English authors instead, as Dickens found on his tour here) in his times limiting American authors who sought a wider audience. Delbanco credits him with figuring out how to "express American ideas and sentiments through European forms". He matured from the exaggerated tease of tropical delights in "Typee" and the more business-minded exchanges of Polynesian beauties in "Omoo". These were successes, but Melville grew impatient with the formula.

He used his seafaring experience, "borrowed" what needed fleshing out from his reading (Delbanco finds it increasingly lofty as he lived in lower Manhattan in the late 1840s and incorporated a "democratic imagination--both in substance and style"), and he listened, this critic avers, to the clanging tone and the typically bustling rhythm of the "oceanic city" where he (it is often forgotten) was born and died.

Delbanco notes that the preparation of "Moby-Dick" and a love-hate relation with the city lured Melville to his brother and his relatives to settle for a productive stint in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, but still, that epic began in a port and near a harbor. That novel's like browsing and walking down a city street: it's unpredictable. Delbanco compares a walker in New York to a reader, needing "high alertness" combined with "willed insouciance" to fend off sly appeals from the margins. Delbanco compares too that fantastical take on lotus-land, "Mardi" and the 135 chapters of "Moby-Dick" with a similar sprawl to the bills posted on municipal walls, one over the other, full of arresting slogans and advertising come-ons; out of a verbal melange, in "Moby"'s chapters and its clauses, that at-first straightforward whaling yarn began to warp into something odd, unanticipated.

Much of it to Delbanco "reads like a transcription of a patient under analysis moving from bravado to depletion", but the novel taps Melville's "bipolar" swing between "public jesting" and "private brooding", and reveals the untapped imagery and manic associations that consumed its composition.

Troubles followed for Melville, as Delbanco gives a lot of space (and we can argue over how much is needed for the psychoanalytical approach he and others take for "Pierre" in light or shadow of its author's purported sexual preferences). "Bartleby" found Melville recovered, finally able to record how ordinary Manhattanites sounded, and that story's appeal to the confounding tension of a radical protest against a rapacious capitalist system and a conservative acknowledgment that in tradition, stability, and intimacy lay hope, kept its own ambiguities vivid. But, stung by criticism, Melville seems to have by the early 1850s started what Delbanco discerns as Melville's uneasy transformation of his "genius" into touches of his "madness".

Weariness dominated his sensibility. In his mid-thirties, he seemed worn-out. "And then the darkness closed in."

Delbanco handles this period with as much attention as the height of Melville's fame, carefully analyzing the writings and other contexts to provide as full a picture as a relatively brisk single volume aimed at a general audience can contain. He keeps the narrative over 330 pages of text vivid, but he avoids moralizing or sentimentality.

Despite the best bits Delbanco gleans, "Clarel" as Holy Land epic is not Melville's return to form. That return did come sporadically: the tension between radical challenge to the social order and conservative compassion and traditional stability in "Bartleby" finds Melville integrating how real people talk. "Benito Cereno" improves on "White-Jacket" by using a naval setting to deepen a moral dilemma, and widening the scope to take on the issue of racism and slavery.

Concluding, "Billy Budd" shows in the late 1880s his steady, if by now streamlined and simplified, style. It emerged slowly, Delbanco tells, "as if he could not bear to let it go". As a "eulogy for the hopes of his youth", it returns to the youthful outlook of "Redburn" and "White-Jacket". But, as labor unrest contended against corporate brutality in Melville's final years, that novella proves the fragility of culture, pitted against the pressures of the law allied with political control. Delbanco judges that Melville shows himself in this last story a "reformed, if not repentant, Romantic".

This fine study fits a necessary niche. It's neither too brief nor too detailed for the curious reader who, perhaps having read some Melville or coming for the first time to him, wants an overview of his life and times. While some earnest Freudian analysis cited or concocted within may stretch the bounds of credulity when it comes to certain critics trying to discern hints of Melville's sexual preferences, and while the treatment of the congressional disputes over slavery digresses a bit, generally this is well-documented without wallowing in professorial jargon or score-settling, Delbanco's 2005 book, for me, proved the companion I needed when I wanted an accessible introduction to why Melville endures nearly two centuries after his birth in the early decades of this vexed United States. (11-23-13 Amazon US)

James Wolcott's "Lucking Out": Book Review

In 1972, dropping out of college on the strength of an encouraging letter from Norman Mailer, Wolcott moves to Manhattan. He comes of age in a dramatic decade, and this brisk, sharp narrative conveys his story in fresh language and enjoyable style. Working his way up from the slush pile and circulation desk to a byline at the Village Voice, moving into the coterie around Pauline Kael, watching the rise of punk, risking his life at the fringes of "adult" entertainment before exposing himself to ballet, and finally reflecting on his arc as a reviewer and journalist, Wolcott's worthwhile.

Despite his patrician name, his humble background didn't nurture high expectations "in my neck of nowhere back then; children weren't fawned over from an early age as 'gifted' and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pluck from the garden yourself." (6) Always cautious due to perhaps this upbringing but bent on breaking in to the circle of New York intellects and characters he idolized, he sums up its limits once he entered their liberal arena. "Everybody seemed to be staring at the same targets through the same pair of binoculars." (24)  

He realizes his luck. Fired from the Voice for daring to display a clean desk twenty minutes before closing time, he writes for a living, "something that would have been impossible if New York had not been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn't require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes." (47)

The New Yorker gains its evocative place, with its ramshackle airs and many characters, back when (a few) writers had offices and editors met with journalists face to face, to dissect their submissions. Pauline Kael takes Wolcott into her own entourage, and we marvel along with Wolcott, "just a few years after leaving college, sitting at the Algonquin with the greatest film critic then or now, part of the gang, wearing jeans that probably need washing and nursing a Coke, the only thing I ever ordered." (103) His affectionate but honest appraisal of Kael and many other talents shows his balanced sensibility, self-aware of his own potential while modest enough to realize his rare luck.

He learns from her to burst into enthusiasms and not to hold back when championing an unfamiliar artist or an unpopular critique, for that may be the only chance "to make people care" about it. "It's better to be thumpingly wrong than a muffled drum with a measured beat." (109)  He segues from the movies to CBGB's and his vignettes with Patti Smith, John Cale, the Talking Heads (he has a crush on Tina Weymouth), and Tom Verlaine enliven this moment of fame as it begins to peep out for a few talents, while leaving others in obscurity. The fickleness of who makes it and who doesn't works for other fields, too. Pornography, ballet, and punk all receive Wolcott's attention as places for the body's pain or transcendence in an awkward or bold moment.

Yet he refuses to "romanticize the antiromanticism of Times Square in the seventies, mourning a lost vibrancy and Brueghelesque teem more authentic that the toy mall we have today, where few tourists will ever know the thrilling fear of having defecation thrown at them or being caught in the middle of a difference of opinion between two hookers ready to cut themselves into unequal chunks." (186) This register shows Wolcott at his sharpest. While despite his verve some of this meanders (the ballet section, for instance), and the five-act structure forces some areas to be attenuated or foreshortened.

He wryly imagines himself as a literary critic, and how bitter he'd be now. "Staring out like Tommy Lee Jones in a bad mood, having long been farmed out by whatever magazine employed me and wishing I had drunk more so I could write a sobriety memoir." (245) Ideas turn into weapons, as exponents bicker and jostle. Wolcott now writes for Vanity Fair, so the clash of celebrities with social critique mixes in a manner suited for that readership. In his final pages, he looks over the decade's literary highs and lows, and how (as in ballet) they gave him a respite from street life, when parks and alleys meant danger. The pleasure of his style moves this memoir along, in its best parts with flair.
(Amazon US 9-5-13)