Passing Craze

As many cheer on Caitlyn Jenner's transition and welcome any "coming out," is the furor over Rachel Dolezal's allegiance as a black woman justified? According to a statement issued by the organization's head office: "One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership." If we acclaim gender transition and cheer "coming out," why not trans-racial self-identification? After all, the left tells us race is a social construct, created in our clannish minds.

After I wrote that paragraph, I read Frederik de Boer, an academic: "In the end, perhaps Dolezal simply believed the convictions of her academic culture a little too much. After all, we on the left have insisted for years that the various demographic categories we are placed into are merely social constructs, the creation of human assumption and human prejudice. That race is a social construct is a stance that brooks no disagreement in left-wing spaces." Hiring urges that the under-represented gain parity. Those marginalized are urged to gain equality. We institutionalize these incentives; we got her re-invention as a member of "her race".

Marcia Dawkins finds that technology accelerated such re-inventions, same as it does for Jenner. And she thinks the media dismissal of Dolezal as "crazy" blocks us from asking tougher questions. "Why is identity considered an editable 'profile' anyway? Do you have to be a person of color to care and advocate for people of color? Does passing make you a coward, a minstrel or a winner? Are there benefits to being perceived as black? Is anyone’s identity, racial or otherwise, 100 percent authentic 100 percent of the time? And the real doozy: Why do we try to get beyond race by clinging to the idea that race is real?" This contradiction sticks. Ideologues and bureaucrats act as if they are trying to advance people based on their diversity, but this does not dismiss race but affirms it as a label.

Unfortunately since I wrote this original entry, the sinister side of racial identity again surfaces. The deaths in Charleston at a Baptist church recall those of the Civil Rights struggle, which is not a period we have closed our books on after all. Such outbreaks occur more frequently, mass ones every 64 days as opposed to every 200 days a few decades ago. Ironically, blacks and whites are "represented equally" in such attacks. Hatred against the Other, technology enabling murder, increases mayhem.

Nell Irvin Painter adds how an "essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between 'bland nothingness' and 'racist hatred.'”

Meanwhile, voices of harmony and liberation seek to counter the domination of such pain in the headlines. Some deny race as a social construct but as with our sexual preferences, others stereotype each of us by it. We try to escape categories even as both the left and the right seek to keep us all marked or slotted. I wonder if this unease we face will harden or loosen "racial" categories in the U.S.

Alysson Hobbs notes: "As a historian who has spent the last 12 years studying 'passing,' I am disheartened that there is so little sympathy for Ms. Dolezal or understanding of her life circumstances. The harsh criticism of her sounds frighteningly similar to the way African-Americans were treated when it was discovered that they had passed as white. They were vilified, accused of deception and condemned for trying to gain membership to a group to which they did not and could never belong." I had thought of this immediately when I heard the story emerge, and I like Hobbs wondered why so much vitriol and ridicule was heaped Dolezal's way, mocking her for "blackface."

In the late 70s, the multiracial singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, took the mike. She did not look like any other front person, even as a punk icon. One of their best songs has her wailing: "When you look in the mirror/Do you see yourself" and then asks: "When you see yourself/Does it make you scream"? The singer's image, her stage name, her own redefinition came to mind the past two weeks.

Image: Ebony magazine, April 1952. At Polygrafi. "The Delicacy of Racial Appearance."

Corporate as avant-garde?

 

While I figured Tom McCarthy's new novel, Satin Island (reviewed in the L.A. Times) might be too much to take on given my busy life and backlog of other books to read for now, I found, thanks to FB friend, the author's Guardian article insightful. It elaborates the anthropological applications that the LAT review and the novel itself document. "The death of writing--if James Joyce were alive today, he'd be working for Google" features this insight among many, near its conclusion:

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed.

His final words remind me of a fact that has intrigued me. Many of my students are computer majors and even more are gamers. But they will work in cubicles, they tap away on laptops, they stare at a screen enchanted for far longer than a book may entice most of them. I doubt they'll fall for "metaphors and metonymies" in pagebound fashion. Music fades, films recede unless tied into a reliable superhero or graphic novel franchise, and culture revolves around gadgets.

 While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.

I live among this. I study languages, I pore over medieval lore and obscure writers, I dream of the past even if my place within it would likely have been a nearly blind boy, falling off a dark cliff not too long into his appointed span of years, one moonless night, hopelessly myopic and too thin to live. I like how Game of Thrones fascinates many. My older son shared this ingenious attempt at HuffPo to reason its fantasy world's workings into the increasingly complex series about to unveil season five.

Contrary to McCarthy, I'd mention from my vantage point among those who seek corporate jobs that this world of work cannot enchant as many. I read Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End one vacation while my workplace underwent a series of "reductions in force" that are still ongoing. I liked it but I was downcast at the same time. Ed Park's Personal Days tried to tie the keyboard-driven class to a rather post-modern conceit, and the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace to my surprise drew me into its accountant's vision, working for the IRS at a Midwestern "office park," of the connection between the government's attempts to change the tax code and corporate hegemony.

All these do sound bleak. Few movies take place mostly at work, and few want to escape this setting by finding entertainment about it. Parks + Recreation or the two versions of The Office, of course, can be cited to the contrary, but compared to the vast subject matter audiences prefer, they're rare.

Meanwhile, I integrate the satirical series Silicon Valley into my Technology, Society and Culture course, and my students sit up. They may even put down their phones. For, they see their ambition.

Revolutionary Suicide, Freeways, Kabbalah, Countdowns

 

I've finished the 40-hour audiobook of Gravity's Rainbow. I had reviewed the book a few years back, when at last I figured I was patient enough for Thomas Pynchon's epic. Actually, while I liked Against the Day's anarchic apocalypsoes far more, I do admire the sometimes overlooked beauty in his prose, amid the coprophilia, antic songs, banana obsessions, bewildering hijinks, and pain. His books put off the uninitiated, as they had me for decades. I'd read Crying of Lot 49 in grad school and Vineland during that same time voluntarily, but that was it. But I kept getting asked if I had read it, so after V. and AtD, Inherent Vice if logically before Bleeding Edge (still in the works), I figured I had to tackle GR as a purported postmodern masterpiece. The PynchonWiki is invaluable. Even if it never responded to my repeated queries as how to become a contributing member. I suspect a gag is afoot.

What stands out on hearing it again is not the Nazi resistance narrated by a young woman, which had moved me the first time. I missed that. Either the fault of the accidental replaying of two hours when I pressed my phone back button by accident on the Audible app, or the noise, for I heard this as background for about two months of my commute, and sometimes I failed to make out narration or hang on every word. I liked George Guidall's wry, demotic, American drawl, educated yet homespun, a fitting match for Pynchon's blend of astonishing erudition (see that wiki) and down-home satire.

I thought about the novel, while recently reviewing Joanna Freed's monograph on Pynchon and the American Counterculture. So, I use this cover of a relevant book she mentions about "revolutionary suicide" by one who advocated it, to dire results. Freed compares this to the Black Panthers' fate.

The last section, as I drove to work down the Long Beach Freeway, made me wonder. "The Horse" opened as I left the house and ranged from a Germanic totemic sacrifice evoked poetically, to a take on the backward countdown of the rocket coming from a Fritz Lang 1929 film, to the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life tied into the ten worlds emanating from the initial pulse of light, to L.A. freeways (were its basic grids already in place by the end of WWII? I doubt it, but Pynchon never seems to err). The one I was on was not mentioned, but the coincidence was notable. The novel does take on so much, all the same. The freeways carry garbage trucks, and these are filled with the fragments of light from the God-explosion, or is it implosion, another connection that outside Pynchon sounds odd.

I leave you with a few passages that leapt out, as the novel reached at last its final pages, recited.

“Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the people.

Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth’s core. "Marxist dialectics? That’s not an opiate, eh?"

"It’s the antidote."

"No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that’s ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it’s no use—or, out of the moment’s velleity, lay it right out for the young fool.

"The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?"

"But you haven’t ever had the choice to make, have you."

"If I ever did, you can be sure—"

"You don’t know. Not till you’re there, Wimpe. You can’t say."

"That doesn’t sound very dialectical."

"I don’t know what it is."

"Then, right up to the point of decision," Wimpe curious but careful, "a man could still be perfectly pure . . ."

"He could be anything. I don’t care. But he’s only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter."

"Real to a Marxist."

"No. Real to himself."

Wimpe looks doubtful.

"I've been there. You haven't.”

I've been reading Ignazio Silone, the anti-fascist novelist between the wars (and during WWII), and contemplating his socialist-Stalinist-Communist-socialist to eventually a democratic socialist free agent. I reckon how I keep seeing, as I study Irish republicanism for so long and witness ideological and again religious fanaticism, and I teach veterans from our recent wars, proof of what we die for. 

We are told we must gear up and fund another endless war on terror, a war that we can never win.

“What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets."

It's part of the plan. My students who fight tell me that between them and us, it's only the military who keep us safe from terrorism, and if not for those armed, we'd be at the mercy of the mean.

 “Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”

This book rewards. My first time through, I don't think my review linked above cited any of these....

“It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”

Finally, as I think Joe Biden of all nitwits cited, or a better educated aide handed him the soundbite: 
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” He knows.

Patrick O'Donnell's "A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell": Review

While often classified as a postmodernist, David Mitchell's novels fit better into other categories. Patrick O'Donnell, in the first full-length study of all six of this English writer's innovative works to date, begins by considering cosmopolitan and anthropological contexts as better suited to this protean storyteller. His books tackle the complexity of how people approach mortality. These tales blur genres, leap across time and space, and dramatize disruption, individually and communally, as threat nears.

Mo Muntervary, an Irish nuclear engineer, observes in Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999): "Memories are their own descendants, masquerading as the ancestors of the present." Her comment reveals her creator's interest in quantum physics and relativity theory. Mitchell applies what O'Donnell labels as the tense of the "future anterior" as past events are linked to a possible future, "on which the past event depends for its significance".

This can be a difficult subject to explain. O'Donnell's study, aimed at an academic audience, focuses on temporal conditions to highlight Mitchell's contribution to current fiction. This critique, as with its sources, challenges easy explication.. Multiple perspectives and genres across the globe mix, while "both human connections and the brutal intransigency of events sporadically collide and conspire in time streaming toward what will have been". While the novels demand close attention, and while they often nonetheless prove more fluid and compelling than a scholarly representation of their contents may express, O'Donnell and Mitchell agree that the events they dramatize matter, far more than as entertainment. They articulate human predicaments, and they confront our planet's danger.

In the unpredictable island nation of monster quakes, sudden death, and mob reprisals, Number 9 Dream (2001) pays tribute to the Japan where Mitchell taught English for eight years in Hiroshima, and where he met his Japanese wife. He also pays homage to Haruki Murakami, for this unstable narrative layers disruptions across Tokyo, as encountered by a young man who may be at different moments or chapters in a James Bond-type of caper, an avatar's fantasy world, a manuscript, or a video game, to name only a few possibilities. As its title indicates, it floats about and jumps around.

Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell's best-known novel to date, wraps five dispersed stories, at first partially completed, around the core of a post-apocalyptic adventure set on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Then, Mitchell continues each interrupted account, concluding them in reverse order. O'Donnell relates the "character chains" which not only enrich the novel's formal innovation, but the 2012 film adaptation's own casting choices which tinker further, if fittingly, with Mitchell's fluid representations of characters who repeat in different guises over the centuries. Mitchell's subtexts of reincarnation and shape-shifting reoccur in nearly all of his novels. Pasts and futures shuffle. Narratives progress and regress. His human and post-human figures confront the depravities of capitalism, the constraints of conformity, and the notions of one's own society as the most civilized of all possible worlds.

While Black Swan Green (2006) certainly proves the most streamlined of his narrative models, it shares his scrutiny into the situations which oppress everyday people, nearer our own time. It is based loosely on some elements from Mitchell's own upbringing, for he and the protagonist were both aged thirteen in 1982, in suburban Worcestershire. Both stammer, both face divorce as their parents separate, both seek to fit into what appears an alien atmosphere, and both share a fascination with the onslaught of popular culture as experienced by ordinary men and women. Yet, this novel nonetheless resists any reduction to a straightforward coming-of-age saga or thinly disguised roman à clef.

Contrary to the treatment many give Mitchell's most accessible and apparently most ordinary novel, taking its events as a satisfying, straightforward recounting of a boy's jitters, O'Donnell finds elements recalling Austen, Dickens, and Joyce. Beneath a chronological depiction of thirteen months in a boy's maturation, the fairy-tale, initiation story, and the novel or manners appear. So do historical chronicle, fantasy touches, and hundreds of brand names, song titles, pop song lyrical snippets, books, and television programs from the early 1980s. O'Donnell places the adolescent narrator into this milieu, as his commodified and oppressive reality. Set as the Falklands War and late-Cold War NATO-Warsaw Pact tensions clouded even a lonely English schoolboy's perspective, this novel continues the pattern Mitchell has woven, one in which everyday people get tangled up in history.

As well as mystery, for as one young man had viewed "a row of screaming Russian dolls" in Tokyo, so another visitor to Japan finds himself, too, in another labyrinth, where possibilities overlap and crush. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Van Zoet (2010) enlivens another familiar genre, that of the historical epic. O'Donnell moves beyond the critical reactions which place this long tale, set in 1799 in Nagasaki harbor as a Dutch trader tries to open up the mainland to trade, within a "stereoscopic" overlay of Asian and Western meetings, or as a post-feminist take on the Orientalist trope of an eager white man falling in love with a, coy, exotic woman. Instead, the personal and the political trip up progress. Translation garbles commercial and intimate exchanges. The lust for profit and the rush for conquest play off against confounding Japanese attempts to manipulate European delegations. Road trips, melodrama, gothic, science fiction, and romance all merge and drift apart in this vast story.

The same ingredients in The Bone Clocks (2014; see my review for PopMatters 16 Sept. 2014) swirl across six decades in the life of another English narrator from the 1980s on, as Holly Sykes finds surprises within mundane circumstances. O'Donnell again shows how Mitchell makes time elastic. In his latest novel, he dramatizes the difficulty of translating concepts, emotions, and points-of-view from one person's perspective into another. Mitchell adds a supernatural dimension. Here, he takes up religious debates, depictions of the sociology of power, late twentieth-century pop culture as trends come and go. He predicts how (a minor but relevant aspect which merited more detail in O'Donnell's critical analysis) reading audiences and literary recognition shift attentions in our own near-future.

Other critics, not cited by O'Donnell in his positive appraisal of Mitchell's fiction, regard some of the writer's efforts as not paying off in their conclusions. His novels all keep a reader turning their pages, they remain honest in their narrative sleight-of-hand, and they offer convincingly drawn protagonists. Yet, some readers and critics shut Mitchell's novels with a sensation of let-down, as if after all the dazzling legerdemain, the magical tricks fail to linger after the performance has ended. O'Donnell diligently finds in each novel the connections which link characters and events across them all (one of the best reasons to read them all in order, I advise) in subtle and playful ways. But if O'Donnell had addressed reader reception by those of us in Mitchell's audience who continue to open each of his works with hope but close them with a nagging feeling that an added effort could be made by their author, this consideration would have strengthened what is an understandable if telling weakness in this work of literary criticism. O'Donnell offers only praise for David Mitchell's diverse set of novels.

Granted, this is not to detract from a considerable achievement. Given he is only forty-five, Mitchell may likely better his present success as an author respected by critics and welcomed on the bestseller lists by readers worldwide. He continues as one of the most talented storytellers and most rewarding fabulists in contemporary fiction. The Bone Clocks handles a very intricate narrative with verve. Mitchell enlivens Holly, telling her life's story, one which for the first time in a Mitchell novel takes precedence throughout the narrative as a female presence. (Typically, this novel's cast of characters and settings overlaps, as we see Mo Muntervary reappear in her Irish home turf, fifteen years after her debut in Mitchell's fiction.) Colliding with what begins the novel (shortly after Black Swan Green) as Holly's daily routine, the clash of the Horologists and Anchorites as they wrestle over "decanting" immortality sharpens Mitchell's depiction of what may be our species' inability to match a utopian concept to a human set of weaknesses, given doubt, lust, temptation, and the profit motive.

Mitchell regards impermanence as the condition in which men and women must endure. He can present this with detachment, another reason some critics and readers get uneasy with his stance. Time, topography, and plot accumulate. They force readers to realize their implicated guilt along with that of characters like us, but as if a few decades later. The plight of the planet, weakened by ecological decay and predatory commercial, political, and social practices we encourage, implicates audiences into Mitchell's dire warnings. Crucial characters cannot be written off as escapist or as alarmist. They face an evil era. While it is close in time to ours, it is one we wish to fend off forever.

Summing up Mitchell's ambitions, O'Donnell charts patterns in six novels which may serve as models of how we can adapt to globalizing circumstances. Individually and collectively, the vexing question of how our lives may continue impels the risks Mitchell takes in each protean narrative. These demonstrate the "clearest sign of his imaginative investment in having a future" we want to create. 
(PopMatters 1-6-15; 1-8-15 Amazon US)

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas": Book Review

I'd been meaning to tackle this over the past decade; I wanted to see the adaptation by the Wachowski siblings released in late 2012. In of all places Park City, Utah (home of Sundance), in the off-season, Layne and I missed it and so opted for "Argo" (cheap ticket) in an exurb faux-Western mall. I tried that Christmas to rally my family after we bickered over Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained and I held down my paternal foot as I wasn't in the mood for either to celebrate the mythical birthdate of the purported Prince of Peace. We chose neither, settling on On the Road. Rarely do I venture into a theater these days, grousing as I do at people. prices, popcorn and promotion, but when I do, I want to see a spectacle enhanced by the big screen. I'd heard that ambitious adaptation of a sprawling narrative was met with bewilderment or annoyance; I'd reckoned the po-mo structure of the Booker Prize finalist (not for the first time for this 2004 entry) would baffle viewers as it did some readers. I left it unseen and still shelved.

Then, investigating "Buddhist Fiction," I found UU World nominated it for its shortlist. Dozens of copies (credit post-Matrix buzz!) were checked out of all L.A. and Pasadena libraries, but South Pasadena had it. I grabbed it. I took it along on too-brief an out-of-town trip, and I enjoyed it. Not sure if I loved it. The uphill climb for its first half is more rewarding: the challenge invigorates you to keep going. It accelerates into the curve, and through its central section. Out of that turn, it's downhill. The novel's easier to read, moves rapidly, but there's a sense of anti-climactic ennui. That may fit well the nature of David Mitchell's investigation of repetition and reincarnation, all the same.

This entry covers the passages explicating the themes I found most intriguing. It doesn't delve into the "Russian doll"-structure inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (as I suspected long before learning Mitchell in 2010 via The Paris Review credited that novel I loved thirty years ago) for the 1-2-3-4-5-6 then reversed arrangement--as this is now common knowledge. 

"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" features a Melville tone: Typee is mentioned later on. South Seas are visited by an American notary from the new city of San Francisco as the Gold Rush erupts. Afflicted by a worm entering his brain carrying a mysterious malady, Adam falls into the care of one Dr. Henry Goose on the voyage on the Prophetess. The style flows easier than much of (the later) Melville: "As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings." (39) We later find a typically casual recurrence of an image in the central story on the Big Island of Hawai'i: "Papery moths blowed thru her shimm'rin' eyes'n'mouth too, to'n'fro, yay, to'n'fro." (264)

"Letters from Zehelgem" might have been penned by John Banville or Julian Barnes. It's the type of contemporary novel that's shortlisted for a Booker Prize--as Mitchell a two-time nominee may know well. In the early 1930s, composer Robert Frobisher flees Cambridge, debtors, and justice by presenting himself in Belgium as an amanuensis to his elderly counterpart, and soon rival of sorts, Vyvyan Ayrs. Frobisher's flight from apprehension to Calais sums up his spirit: "Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue." (46) 

The tattered book he finds in Ayrs' manse, or half of it, is Ewing's journal, published by his son. In turn, "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" continues the saga as the recipient of Frobisher's letters back to England, Rufus Sixsmith, returns at the age of 66. He's a successful nuclear physicist in the late 1970s in California. But he's restless in Buenas Yerbas (a reversal of an early placename for S.F., by the way.) "West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, beserking American continent." (89) His career and his stance on this energy does not please a sinister (naturally) Seabrook corporation. Out of this, one "Hilary V. Hush" generates a pulp thriller, full of chases and conspiracies.

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" takes us to that middle-aged, put-upon middle man, in contemporary England, who runs a feeble "author partnership" press: in its slush pile lands the first Luisa Rey mystery. He deals with the aftermath of a cause celebre where the writer of Knuckle Sandwich meets sudden notoriety, and the attention generates fame and profits for Cavendish. Flush with the proceeds, all seems it will go well, until it doesn't.  Kingsley or Martin Amis might be at home here. Consider this look as Timothy must flee from London: "you sly toupeed quizmaster, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blackened bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen, et al.; hot glass buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother." (161) 

On his journey north, Cavendish raises a theme common to Mitchell's characters: "we cross, criscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." (163) His story stops suddenly (as do others), and we leap into an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where a Korean superstate dominates a blighted planet. "An Orison of Sonmi-451" in the fashion of Haruki Murakami or Philip K. Dick follows an engineered fabricant's entry into sentience. Escorted out of her climate controlled confines, she confides to her listener the strangeness of a natural reality: "Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me." (202) In such phrasing, the beauty of Mitchell's observations freshen the familiar. 

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" occupies the core around which the other stories are mirrored in two, or tucked into. Zachry's telling recalls the altered language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, as well as the dialect and the quest of Huck Finn as one society's fragility is shattered by the arrival of tension, disruption, and unsettling values and ideas. These, filtered via Meronym from an enclave beyond the insular Valleymen, force Zachry to come of age in a brutal clash of cultures and enemies. The Valleymen are visited by Meronym, and Zachry learns why they have ventured so far across the ocean. What has happened after the demise of Nea So Corpros as the Korean hegemony is little understood; Meronym and a few Prescients guard a few factual or mythic gleanings against predators and plague that roil the globe and the miniscule remnants who've survived Earth's collapse.

The Old 'Uns have died off, and ignorance is their legacy to the stragglers who struggle after the meltdown. "Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.” (272) Civilization vs. savagery tears apart the survivors: it's as if delayed gratification eliminated the consumers and capitalists, the warlords and the masses unable to wait and think before rushing to buy, spend, fight, grab, grasp. "Old 'Uns got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall." (303)

The novel then proceeds to wrap up Zachry's chronicle and propel us back the same way we came in. Although Cavendish sniffs: "As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.'s in postmodernism and chaos theory." (150) Of course, such devices long predate what was my own long slog through this at just this time in grad school and my own collegiate reading in and out of class. Mitchell applies these through such images as the moths cited earlier. It's not that difficult a novel to follow as some grousing readers and critics lamented; anyone who can read Calvino's tale can handle this. The second half, however, moves rapidly and feels often somewhat less engaging as the puzzle-pieces neatly snap together in turn. 

One device that audiences apparently needed a visual guide and a screenplay reboot for in the (unseen as yet by me) film version was the comet-shaped birthmark used by Mitchell to suggest reincarnations or rebirths of protagonists.  On pg. 85, Frobisher introduces his; Luisa finds this
and matches it to her own despite "I just don't believe in this crap" (120) and she tries to talk herself out of it as a coincidence. (122)  Zachry sees on Meronym her "whoahsome wyrd" one just below her shoulder blade in the light of Lady Moon (303); Cavendish reasons such an image "will have to go" if the Luisa Rey "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" will succeed on its potential. "Far too hippie-druggy-New Age"--a sentiment I've found echoed by some resenting the storyline as a novel or a film. (357)

Given as the UU World site and its counterpart study include this on a list of "Buddhist fiction," and granted the Cambridge-trained, now County Cork resident writer married to a Japanese woman and immersed via his fiction in Asian settings, there's no escaping placement of this novel into this niche. Yet, it rests there lightly. 

In "Orison," Sonmi hears from an Abbess (this rank continues among the Valleyman's cult of ancestor worship by icons in barrows on the Big Island) from the ranks of "recidivists" in a cave hidden as a safe house for her and other "tapeworms" who huddle off the corporacratic grid. For "fifteen centuries," nuns have persisted there. A stone figure (resembling of all people Cavendish) named Siddhartha "is a dead man a living ideal." (330) Little is known of the man; his "names" tellingly as well as his doctrine have been forgotten, after the Abbess's elder mentors had been eliminated when "non-consumer religions were criminalized." (The prediction made by the Buddha that after 2500 years his own message would gradually fade comes to mind; the rule of the Corporation-State forming around us may presage "Maitreya" ending the next span of five thousand years as the Buddha's successor. But such speculation lies outside the margins of Mitchell's ambitious narrative.) Sonmi manages to wish for reincarnation in the "colony" and on departure, the Abbess promises to relay her wish to Siddhartha. Later, Zachry will unlock an orison brought by Meronym that reveals Sonmi, whose cult will spread until she has been elevated to a goddess status by the Valleymen.

Progress, these shifts in belief and power, and earthly fate concern others in this novel. Earlier, Frobisher remarks on an aquatint of a Siamese temple. He compares its lore as it's relentlessly ornamented and improved: it will one day be equal to "its counterpart in the Pure Land" (81). Then, humanity's purpose fulfilled, Time will conclude. Frobisher offers an alternative analogy. Like Ayrs, the edifice rises upon the backs of ignorant and anonymous labor, and civilization claims its resplendence through those statesmen and artists who take the credit for themselves, as "architects, masons, and priests."

In the fittingly titled "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" Isaac Sachs contemplates the actual vs. a virtual past. The Nietzschean will-to-power enters Vyvyan and Robert's verbal sparring, and by this later section, the Sixsmith Report of Frobisher's correspondent stands for the threat to this humanist resistance against the machine men and women build (like that Siamese temple?). Sachs proposes a virtual past (as in the legacy in story of the Titanic outlasting the memories of its "real-time" survivors) and wonders how corporations and governments will co-opt this. 

Sachs continues to sum up the greater novel he's part of unwittingly. "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual future." (393) Naturally, comparison of this structure to a Buddhist (or post-modern) conception of impermanence and instability within the stories we tell and which we tell of ourselves opens this up to a neat critique***.

A few pages later, Luisa and a boy, Javier, discuss what if one could see the future. Javier asks: would you want to? Luisa hesitates, wanting to know if the future so seen could be changed or not. (401) She ruminates that acting now in the expectation of what the future holds may trigger that future scenario. "What happens in a minute's time is made by what you do." She leaves the conversation wondering inside her head about this "great imponderable." "Maybe the answer is not one of metaphysics but one, simply, of power."

Necessarily inconclusive, this novel of ideas in its last segment, a reprise of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" deals with civilized incursions across the globe, and how power forces change and alters presents and futures. "Ships bring disease dust here," Mr. Wagstaff observes to Ewing as they land at a Christian settlement on Rataoia in the newly named Society Islands. The natives die off, slaves are imported from other islands, and the natives decline in fertility as religious fervor does not inspire fecundity. "To kill what you cherish & cure," Wagstaff smiles, "that seems to be the way of things." (486)

Countering the missionary endeavor and its social Darwinism with humanist reasoning, Adam denies any rules in history. He affirms only outcomes. "Vicious acts and virtuous acts" spur results. (507) These acts emerge from belief. To fight "the 'natural' order of things," confidence in human qualities beyond selfishness impel idealists such as Ewing. He vows to become an Abolitionist (we glimpse this cadre in Sonmi's fearful realm), and he vows to become a force for change, even if but "one drop in a limitless ocean." (509) With that promise, we place back the novel's last nestled doll, or its first. 

(Amazon US 3-5-13 in shorter, depersonalized, slightly rewritten version. ***I've expanded the Buddhist and post-Buddhist, Marxian and anarchistic associations spun out of the encounter between Sonmi and the Abbess about Siddhartha in comment #2 replying to "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism: Give Marx Some Credit," by Glenn Wallis at Speculative Non-Buddhism on 3-7-13. I extended that into more countercultural contexts on 3-9-13 in comment #11 and virtual realm applications on 3-8-13 in comment #6,)

David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten": Book Review

After enjoying Cloud Atlas (Amazon US 3-13-13; see an expanded reflection on my blog), I resolved to read David Mitchell's novels in order. I find the same strengths in his 1999 debut, and some of his slight weaknesses. The challenge Mitchell's fiction embeds is his genre. If it takes its energy and ideas from speculative styles, it also contains that genre's flaw. Ideas dominate, and compelling characters or plot coherence may lag, or flag as thriller elements and mass-market tropes (evil government, financial chaos, conspiracy, terror, thievery, struggling artists or writers, mythic messages, globalization) mingle with more elevated reflections from literary fiction (quantum physics, time and space loops, transmigration, and still more conspiracies and collusions). Mitchell's skill keeps him juggling the reiterating images, and it's fun to watch. Camphor trees, for some reason, prove to me the most enduring of these. You'll also find glimpses of characters/themes in his later work.

That aspect, for an author beginning his career, intrigued me: one reason why I am moving backwards in Mitchell's oeuvre to watch the dots connect. As many summations of these nine interlinked stories of Ghostwritten can be found, I will limit my review to  a favorite snippet from each that captures its essence. "My last defense is my ordinariness." (27) So confides a Japanese fugitive hiding on Okinawa, in a first chapter inspired by real events unleashed, where Mitchell was living in Hiroshima when this was published. We find people seemingly like us in this book, but of course, all hold some secret or are tied to a larger destiny, as elusive as the meaning of camphor trees.

Another Japanese man, barely out of his teens, falls in love. He's a jazz aficionado and sax player.. At the record store he clerks in, he finds his destiny in a comely customer. "The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me." (54). Satoru's account draws you in: a literate and thoughtful register that sets off the paranoid devotion of his countryman in the previous chapter effectively. You get the sensation as does he you as a reader are in a story written by another: a casual note that lingers in this novel.

Neil Brose, an Englishman in Hong Kong and a lawyer enmeshed in the markets sector, finds himself noticing what the title of the novel portends, in everyday terms. "Her coming was the coming of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it." (80) His tale, also set in Asia, overlaps slightly with that of Saturo, as that one did with the man we know as Quasar in the opening.

Moving inward, more Chinese terrain is seen, if from the limited vantage point of an old woman who converses with her "Tree" on Holy Mountain, a site where Nationalists, warlords, brigands, Communist cadres, and finally PRC capitalists contend to control and despoil over the past century. "Nobody owns the land, so nobody made sure it was respected." (125) Cleaning up the messes men make, the anonymous tea shack guardian watches over a patch of the world trying to evade those who seek to cleanse it for greed, ideology, and power. She sees through all her persecutors. "Nothing often passes in men as wisdom."(128) So goes the folly of collectivism. Buddhism enters these tales at a tangent, as does the creation of entities and the apparent transfer of souls; Mitchell glances at these notions more than obsesses on them, and they're filtered by the culture and background and understanding of each of the protagonists.

This wobbles all over the next chapter, the unsteady center of the narrative. We appear to be told by the guiding spirit its origins with a Chinese brigand in Mongolia in the 1930s, and a Tibetan Yellow Hat monk seems to have played a role in its conception or generation. "Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path." (155) Recalling for me (pp. 194-5) the bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this quest stays dim; this part follows the narrator as she travels from person to person trying to learn of her own creation.

A security guard at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg enters, cocky of her connivance. "As exquisite as being shot!" (204) So she savors a cigarette early in her chapter. The relentless struggle continued from Soviet Russia into capitalist thuggery gets its time on stage, in a section reminding me of pulp entertainment--the heist itself, I might add, as elsewhere in Mitchell, works on its own merits, too. They may be limited intentionally or by the conventions of the genre, but they keep you engaged.

Tim Cavendish will star in his own chapter (and Luisa Rey who appears in a later one) in Cloud Atlas, five years after this novel appeared, and they have cameos here. Tim meets with Marco, a drummer for a loose band The Music of Chance, and Marco conveys the downside of downscale Cool London from the late '90s effectively. He reflects tellingly (on pg. 283) on fate vs. chance. Fate is when your story is read by one on the outside, as in a novel. Chance is when you are in that novel, with no idea of how your story will conclude, or why it's yours at all. This begins with an episode tying this to chapter three, and from here on, characters will begin to enter each other's stories, if perhaps as extras or walk-ons, until the end of the novel. As Marco wonders about memories and actions: it's as if they're "pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." (287)

Mo Muntervary's predicament as forces unleashed precisely in the First Gulf War lead her to confront the security state as a physicist who rejects using knowledge for weapons of mass destruction. "Technology is repeatable miracles." (329) I liked how Mitchell delays the revelation of the teller's gender and of the spouse's condition, but I did not like two errors. "Seventeen counties of Ireland" (317) from a native of that Republic in recollection falls short of the mark, partition or not; also, wouldn't a scientist measure the time it takes the sun's radiated light to hit a retina on earth at eight rather than "twenty-six" (343) minutes? And, on Clear Island off Cork (Mitchell later moved to Clonakilty), inhabitants feel more as if from some Brigadoon in fake-Celtic details than as real.

I doubt anyone in Ireland inherited surnames such as Mrs. Cuchthulain (sic) or Tourmakeady. Also, Mo's surname, Muntervary, is a garbling of nearby Sheep's Head in the original Irish. Something's up, as Daibhi O Bruadair appears (he was a Gaelic poet centuries ago) and so does a dead Gabriel Fitzmaurice (a living Irish poet) as islanders. Given Mitchell's usual command of detail, this chapter feels awry. He left it in two errors, or he erred twice, Mo's chapter rests on unreliable facts, or Mitchell's parodying an "airport paperback" mass-market genre resting on flimsy or bad backstory.

With Mo's foes such as The Texan, Heinz Formaggio, and Mr. Stoltz on behalf of Homer Quancog, one suspects Pynchon territory by now. The penultimate chapter features d.j. Bat Segundo's Night Train call-in show for the New York graveyard shift. The Zookeeper warns listeners: "You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos." (414) This proved engaging, but as another caller explains (?), "I'm speaking through an ingrown looped matrix, Zookeeper." (417) That caller may or may not be the teller of the final vignette, therefore.

Is this legerdemain or talent? Mitchell sets up the kind of postmodern circularity that his predecessors and influences pioneered, and which contemporaries pursue. Borges, Pynchon, De Lillo, or later Roberto Bolano (as the following decade after this novel appeared has brought him international acclaim) and naturally Haruki Murakami fit onto this same eclectic shelf. This slows at times and in the middle and the end you feel the attempts to make links either match or not, and this playfulness can get too sly; you sense a young writer straining to make his mark originally. He comes close, however, and it's a deserving if somewhat uneven entry into his lively imagination.
(Amazon US 8-18-13)

Michael Hemmingson's "William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews": Review

In part I: Freedom, Redemption, and Prostitution, Hemmingson discusses dominant themes: the individual seeking to survive or resist within the system. Chapter One covers in more than detail than usual in this volume the debut novel that portrays this as a circle, a spiral, a trap repeated over and over in You Bright and Risen Angels. Then, it's a survey of freedom sought in Rainbow Stories, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epigrams, if far too brief a glance at the massive WWII Soviet-Nazi epic Europe Central.
 
Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes in its first four installments to date in this monograph remain skimmed rather than dissected. A few pages per novel leave one with an insufficient appreciation of what each chronicle comprises, and their plots. (I've recently reviewed each: The Ice-Shirt; Fathers and Crows; Argall; The Rifles.) However, Hemmingson explains earlier the general approach Vollmann prefers for most of his oeuvre. He clarified in a 2006 Poets & Writers Magazine interview how the "different genres are like different paint brushes you might pick up, which create different effects"; the works, Hemmingson introduces, combine "fiction, memoir, erotica, journalism, social critique, ethnography, history, and speculative fiction." (7) Hemmingson alludes to the academic apparatus (and, I add, insights informing many of his books via experts) added to the Dreams series (and other books) as Vollmann's typical method, which exposes the difficulty of interpreting claims and judging motives.

Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family earn attention for their milieux in Asia and in San Francisco, two areas Vollmann has explored as a journalist and participant-observer. In this loose trilogy he also incorporates himself as a character, as well as a chronicler of low-life redemption. Hemmingson makes this seamy material inviting, noting its compassion and nuance.
 
An enormous project on the ethics of violence and the taking of life, Rising Up & Rising Down earns a brisk survey, more oriented to the condensed version given the original's scarcity to most readers. Hemmingson critiques the scattershot nature of Vollmann's An Afghanistan Picture Show and appears to favor the diverse collage of fact and fiction that comprises a similarly conceived The Atlas. Likewise, he prefers Poor People to the more diffuse and self-absorbed literary musings of Riding Toward Everywhere. As for Imperial, its scope and heft again dwarf the few pages allotted to it here. 

As Hemmingson tallies Vollmann's labels, they prove many: "a postmodernist, metafictionist, contemporary and historical novelist, pornographer, journalist, cultural/social critic, travel writer, and memoirist." (67) One senses this critic and his subject share an affinity for the adventure of a war correspondent, and a journalist willing to plunge into the raw, wounded, and seamier sides of life. Despite a lack of proofreading and a brevity at odds with Vollmann's vast range, this as the author intends represents by default "the starting point for all Vollmann studies." Its compact size may contrast with (as even a sympathetic critic such as Hemmingson confronts) Vollmann's refusal to accept editing, but the summations of texts and the interviews compiled make this a handy reference. 

Part II offers Seven Conversations, many drawn from the Net, but also expanded or published in full. In full form, you can read 1991's "Moth to the Flame," with Larry McCaffery. Then, shorter takes enter as The Write Stuff, a 1994 ALT-X Interview, and "William Vollmann Shares Vision" with Michelle Goldberg, 2000. Another 2001 interview with McCaffery follows as "Pattern Recognitions."

"Drinks With Tony" is a 2005 interview with Tony Dushane at Bookslut. "The Subversive Dialogues" with Kate Braverman follows from 2006. Finally, "A Day At William T. Vollmann’s Studio" is A Quarterly Conversation 2007 interview with Terri Saul on his series of transformed book objects.

The book concludes with a bibliography up to around 2008. Added is a list of “CoTangent Press Book Arts” about the limited-edition book objects; McCaffery and Hemmingson included illustrations from these and context in their own useful 2004 Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden.
(Amazon US 2-21-14)
-------------------------------
Paris Review #163 interview with Madison Smartt Bell, Fall 2000.

Free Williamsburg interview with Alexander Laurence, May 2001.
 
YouTube shows Larry McCaffery discussing Vollmann at MLA 2011.
 
Vollmann Club collects links, some dead, from its long-dormant book discussion.
 
Holdings of the Vollmann Archive at Ohio State University.
 
P.S. These URLs (excepting my own embedded italicized reviews as linked), expanded the ToC by Nathan R. Gaddis as his helpful 2013 Goodreads post.
--------------------------------
Mostly via the working links on Vollmann at Wikipedia, I append a few more interviews and reviews:
 
Bell again in NY Times Magazine on Vollmann, 2004 profile.  

James Gibbons on Expelled and Europe and much more in Bookforum, 2005.

Ben Bush in the 2006 Poets & Writers Magazine interview cited above. 

John Cotter on Poor People ca. 2007 at Open Letters Monthly.

Jeff Bursey on Expelled and Poor 2008, Electronic Book Review.

Vollmann on the ethics of photography, "Seeing Eye to Eye," Bookforum, 2009. 

Steven Ross at The Brooklyn Rail after the publication of Imperial, 2010.  

Ben Bush after the publication of Last Stories, Bookforum, 2014.

Tom Bissell at The New Republic after the publication of Last Stories, 2014. 

"Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader": Review

This 2004 anthology, as introduced by critic Larry McCaffery, presents Vollmann's body of work as if a quirky parallel to a fan's in-depth retrospective on Bruce Springsteen. That is, it shows early and obscure work, unreleased compositions, as well as the hits. Michael Hemmingson's preface shows--as with The Boss--how Vollmann inspired his contemporaries to create and to follow his example, if more on the fringes of critical acclaim to date compared to the #1 success of Springsteen. But, as Bruce was once but a cult figure, so may Vollmann still break through.

Part 1 looks at his background and influences. "The Land of Counterpane" reveals a boyhood fear of "wrinkles" that reminds us of the terror as well as release within our imaginary encounters with tales at an early age. "The Butterfly Boy" finds a stand-in for the bullied young Bill; and "Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A. (1968)" charts the death of his sister which marked him while growing up. "Some Thoughts on Neglected Water Taps" respectfully surveys his Deep Springs College years. I think the "List of 'Contemporary' Books Most Admired by Vollmann (1990)" is well-chosen for a smart man nearing thirty, but the editors seem to understate that his father taught at Dartmouth, Rhode Island, and Indiana, and that as a straight-A student at Cornell and a dropout from Berkeley's doctoral program, Vollmann certainly benefited from exposure to "high" culture all his life. His early story excerpt "The Ghost of Magnetism" displays well his talents for the hallucinatory and vivid.

Part II plunges into death, war, and violence. "Three Meditations on Death" from the Paris catacombs, the San Francisco morgue, and the Serb-Croatian p-o-v prove harrowing. "Across the Divide" evenly listens to the Taliban and their opponents. "Regrets of a Schoolteacher" glimpses a Yakuza recruit's troubled career. "Zoya" from Europe Central presents a Soviet woman's hanging by the Nazis. From "The Grave of Lost Stories" peeps into Poe. Vollmann's review of Reporting Vietnam shows influences that marked him in his youth (although he seems a bit too young to have feared being called up for any draft over there). "Some Thoughts on the Value of Writing during Wartime" challenges writers to understand goodness and to seek truth honestly from opponents as well as supporters of state and rebel violence. But a snip from his massive Rising Up and Rising Down treatment of a "tentative ethics" of rationales for violence as "Moral Calculus" needed more context.

Part III dives into another controversial theme, that of love and sex, but mainly prostitutes, and a bit of pornography. The amount of material should satisfy casual readers wondering how and why Vollmann gravitates towards this domain. He tells of a seedy hotel, scuttled with cockroaches and smelling of a crack pipe, and you should be convinced that he knows this realm well. He repeats the familiar argument that in our economic reality, we all sell ourselves for another's gain or pleasure. He encourages as with war reporting that observers promote honesty and try to connect the Self with the Other, a theme that he returns to in the literary criticism that he contributes to through his life's work.

Part IV shows the backdrop as travel for these books. I found his collegiate letters about "the advantages of space" and "a bizarre proposition" jejune. More revealing was "The Conquest of Kianazor" as an early template for his fictional imagination. "Subzero's Debt" from The Rifles serves as a dramatic test of his own Arctic limits, and luckily less life-threatening, "The Water of Life" from Imperial charts his attempt to ride the New River through that polluted, parched, and odd valley.

Part V, on writing, literature, and culture champions his what one piece titles "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-Hearted Un-Deleter" and potential Nobel Prize winner" and despite one's caution at such a claim, if you read Vollmann patiently and deeply, you too may be convinced that this isn't hyperbole. He returns to rally by "understanding without approving or hating. By empathizing." ("American Writing Today: Diagnosis of a Disease" 330)  His "Afterword to Danilo Kiš's 'A Tomb for Boris Davidovich' raises the "unending debate between revolutionaries and conservatives" by asking whether "unavoidable, essential existence" accounted for "beaten wives, perished workers and misled children" or "whether their tragedies, being the results of human agency, may be addressed through a massive change in social structures." (337)  He tackles ideology, and why we rush to a cause. "Maybe in politics as in sexuality, a purity of passion exists in the preconsummation state of half-blind surmises." (339) He reviews his own Argall in jaundiced fashion as he imitates critics of his prolixity and proliferation in "The Stench of Corpses." An appreciation of two influences, one prolix, one populist, enlivens "Melville's Magic Mountain" and "Steinbeck: Most American of Us All." 

Valuable appendices as a thorough and revealing Vollmann-and-more chronology by McCaffery and Vollman's "Seven Dreams: Description of Project" assist any researcher or reader of his vast oeuvre to date. Samples of his working style with collaborators and his CoTangent Press book objects show more examples of how Vollmann goes beyond writing, as an artist and documentarian, to try to, as he sums up in a postscript, remain moral. "I have no trade, make nothing but pretty things which fail against the seriousness of rice." He goes on, half-humbly, and perhaps half-self-consciously in a biblical or proverbial sense (I sense he wears many masks): "When they did me evil, I received it gracefully; when they were good to me, I returned my thanks." (479) While I could do without the photo of young Vollmann with his Beretta as this panders to a voyeuristic sensibility that "Rising" may have tempered, and while the blurbed emphasis on not-yet-published works adds up only to the section from Imperial and the then-about to be released Europe Central, it's for now the only way into so many of his many works. For this, thanks to this author and editors, too. (Amazon US 2-9-14)