Will

The double entendre that is the title of Christopher Rush’s bracing, brilliant new novel Will is shorthand for the inspired idea at the heart of the book: a lawyer has come to Stratford to take down the last will and testament of Will Shakespeare, who’s feeling old and ailing and doesn’t, we know, have long to live. Just that: just that simple: Rush uses the famous will to prod the famous Will to retrace the winding paths of his life and times, with the lawyer as first questioner and then quickly awestruck audience. And the lawyer’s not the only one; by the time half a dozen pages have passed, the reader is also awestruck – and mighty damn pleased. This is a book to grapple to you with hoops of steel, an entirely grand, roistering, true book that you know right away you’ll wish to savor, to inhabit, and to endlessly recommend.

Rush in his parting comments tells us that this novel has been “growing underground” for his entire life, and certainly the finished product shows it. There’s not a scene, not a scrap of dialogue, not a single throwaway observation that doesn’t spring wholly to life in your mind, and virtually every page features some passage that begs to be copied out longhand. For instance, here’s Will’s imagining of his mother’s grief at the death of her firstborn baby girl:

So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

Rush’s Will is having his final say about everything, in one headlong monologue after another, and as with the real Bard, you want to quote almost all of it – like the page-long rumination on the infamous Tower of London, a part of which reads like this:

Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitor’s Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of the scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles.The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head down on the block simply to let Henry Tudor’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.

Or Will’s grudging-generous tribute to Philip Henslowe, seedy proprietor of the Rose theater:

One thing, he would never see you stuck, always saw you round a hard corner. Drove you to regret it later, but without him there might never have been a later. He stood between some poor swine and suicide or the wolf at the door, and when times were hard in London I knew I could always go to Henslowe. He knew what he could wring out of me in return. ‘Your pen is mine, Will. Write me a bright speech, finish me that dull play and make it sparkle, conclude that Act. I have a scene here needs re-working for tomorrow and there’s no pen that speeds like your pen. Harry the Sixth? Harry the Sixth can wait. Harry the Sixth comes after Henslowe the First, Philip the Foremost.’ (Philip the Foreskin to his debtors).

We would expect a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare to be on display in a novel about the Swan of Avon (although countless novels have bungled their way into disarming that expectation), but what really shines in excerpts like these and countless others in the book is something more, a love of Shakespeare that suffuses everything about the man, his times, and his plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean times come alive on these pages, but the real treat here is the sense of the man. Actual biographies of Shakespeare can be a losing game, as Samuel Schoenbaum so amply demonstrated in his massive Shakespeare’s Lives (and as talented writers can play nonetheless, as, for instance, Charles Nicholl showed in his recent study The Lodger Shakespeare), and here fiction can act with more freedom. At one point Rush’s Shakespeare satisfyingly describes himself, saying “The upstart crow was in fact a good citizen and a talented and genuine writer: upright in his actions, honest in his dealings, civil in his demeanor, urbane in his art – and with a ball-crushing grip” … and reading along, we can’t help but agree.

Novels as strong as Will don’t come along as often as anybody would wish. Under no circumstances miss this book.

– Steve Donoghue

So it seems only fitting to doff our caps today to the man who started it all (and no, we’re not talking about poor wretched Doctor Polidori, who can continue to rest in peace). Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker, the Irish-born (in 1847) journalist, critic, and theater manager who in 1897 gave the world Dracula. “Time is on my side” the fiendish Count says at one point in that novel (which is far more entertaining than you might recall and well worth a celebratory re-read), and it certainly has been: ‘Dracula’ as a literary icon has entered the pantheon of instantly-recognizable figures such as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. A new hardcover edition of Dracula is in bookstores now (as well as its very first Stoker family-authorized sequel!), a vampire series is the hit of HBO, and a new Dracula movie is in the works – and we owe it all to Stoker, who had the stroke of genius to bring these creatures of musty old folklore into the light of the present day and set them loose on modern science.

By one of those hair-raising coincidences that so bedevil the literary world, this is also the birth-date of Vlad Tepes, the big-nosed and utterly ruthless Romanian warlord known to history as “the Impaler.” But at Open Letters we’re peaceful folk, so we’re going to let him rest in peace too.

Translators disparage their predecessors only at great peril, for every translation stands as somebody’s favorite. Translators who disparage full-blown masterpieces of their art risk looking like fools. So may God’s eye be on David Slavitt, who nears these kinds of dangers from the moment he opens his mouth in the Translator’s Preface to his new version of Ariosto’s Renaissance masterpiece Orlando Furioso.

Ariosto’s enormous masterpiece (Charles Ross, in his Introduction to this present work, says Ariosto “never outdoes Dante – no one does,” but this is simplistic; Ariosto is in every way superior to the sacerdotal bore who birthed the Paradiso) was translated in 1975 by Barbara Reynolds, and her work is stunning, an incredible achievement. Slavitt says “it isn’t funny enough, or sprightly enough.” This is not only boorish but inaccurate – Reynolds is delightful company throughout, and Slavitt should recall that although Ariosto primarily wanted to entertain his audiences at the court of Ferrara, he also wanted to move them with fine sentiment finely phrased. In straining for the funny and the sprightly, Slavitt’s version (an abridgment, containing roughly half the length of the poem) far too often becomes something neither its author (nor those fine lords and ladies in his original audience) nor any but the laziest reader today would enjoy.

The Reynolds translation is accompanied by copious notes (Ariosto’s work, vastly allusive, benefits greatly from them) and glossaries; the Slavitt version has no notes and only the slimmest scrim of a glossary, but such appendixes are always secondary to the verse itself, and comparisons are inevitable. The poem is immense, and so examples abound, but we’ll pick just one: the moment when the pagan princess Angelica first confesses to the handsome young warrior Medoro that she’s in love with him (and with poor Orlando, who’s furioso over that very fact). Here’s Reynolds:

If of her longing she is not to die,
She must herself ask help without delay;
And well she knows that she cannot rely
On him she loves the needed words to say.
So, all restraint and modesty put by,
Her tongue, no less her eyes, dares now to pray
For mercy; from that blow she begs him save her
Which the fair youth, perhaps unknowingly, gave her.

And here’s Slavitt:

The girl understands what is happening perfectly well
and is beside herself. In desperation
she waives protocol and decides to tell
the youth what ails her, making a declaration
that he may choose to spurn (which would be hell
on wheels) or he could show appreciation
for what she’s done for him, or pity, or
even perhaps reciprocate and more.

There is a good deal more of this in Slavitt; people are dressed to the nines, they fall on their duffs, they “ad lib”. Everywhere in his version, there’s the air of horsing around with undergraduates (one couplet achieves its rhyme thus: “and in short order they approach Marseilles/and are happy after traveling all that weilles”). But the real difference is that the Reynolds version is poetry, where the Slavitt version is only disjointed narrative.

Slavitt calls the ottava rima stanza of Ariosto “inherently humorous,” but he seldom uses it in its pure form, opting instead for a loosey-goosey meter that sometimes succeeds in conveying Ariosto’s conversational moments but utterly fails to capture his lyrical side. This failure is abetted by Slavitt’s love of idiom and cliché – he’ll swerve a mile out of his way to hit a dated piece of slang, as can be seen in the fact that those mere eight lines contain four such turns of phrase.

The result is an Orlando Furioso that is purely for the moment. Most readers today are unfamiliar with Ariosto, which is monstrously unfortunate – his book is very long, yes (and no good service is rendered by abridging it – who these days would dare abridge the Commedia? But the Orlando Furioso is fair game?), but it’s also endlessly enjoyable. Readers who might otherwise be frightened off by the length and the verse might be tempted by Slavitt’s shorter (though still hefty) and more approachable version. If this happens – if peradventure twenty or even ten readers try Ariosto now who haven’t tried him before – then perhaps we can forgive Slavitt his sloppy liberties. His sins are many, but that would be a mighty atonement.

–Bartolomeo Piccolomini

So we turned with added attention to the 30 October issue of the TLS to take in their response to Pete Dexter’s latest novel Spooner, which is reviewed at length in our November issue by Sam Sacks. As great as the TLS is, their fiction reviews can sometimes be, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and when it comes to American fiction, their writers often seem to be working through anger therapy rather than examining a writer’s work.

Fortunately (for all concerned, really), the reviewer this time is T. O. Treadwell, as steady and first-rate a critic as ever sidled up to a typewriter, and Dexter’s book gets an entirely fair assessment, complete with quotable lines. About Calmer Ottoson, for instance, the true-blue  father-figure to the novel’s protagonist, Treadwell writes, “To draw a virtuous character without sentiment is notoriously difficult, and Dexter’s success here is not the least of his novel’s achievements.”

Most of the critics who’ve looked at Spooner have dwelt at length on the novel’s autobiographical aspects (Sacks makes a rather pointed reference to “the canny deflections of the memoirist”), and Treadwell – whose review is not long – does likewise, at one point mentioning, “One of the attractions of the fictional memoir must be the opportunity it offers for settling old scores, and Spooner contains a splendid range of monsters, many of them brought to satisfyingly gruesome nemesis.”

Treadwell’s verdict is kind: “Pete Dexter has transmuted the vicissitudes of a turbulent life into an accomplished novel.” To learn a great deal more about Dexter’s writing career in general and Spooner in specific – and to see what final verdict Sacks himself hands down on the final product, click on over to our November issue. And then tell us what you think, of course.

How Some People Like Their Eggs

Sean Lovelace is clever. His chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs, the winner of the 2009 Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, is brimming with shrewd, energetic comparisons: two people aimlessly walk “like two paper cups blown across a grassy courtyard”; bubbles in beer rise “like glass elevators”; a pamphlet makes someone’s grip feel like “pin-pulled grenades.” Leukemia is described as a “disease wherein the white cells run amuck and drink too much cheap beer and urinate in public and hang from motel balconies and generally harm themselves and others like teenagers on spring break in Florida.” And all this comes from the opening story.

Sean Lovelace is funny. Here he offers excerpts from Charlie Brown’s diary. Yes, that Charlie Brown, the bald kid with a beagle named, well, you know. CB wakes up each day to “birds coughing” and reflects that his familiar refrain Good grief is “[a]n oxymoron, or maybe life.” Then there’s the story of a guy obsessed with bocce, who feels like “a cloud in someone else’s dream.” With inimitable style, Lovelace describes a stomach as “flopping like a halibut in an ice chest,” and rain falling on a roof “like a giant herd of tiny, tiny horses running circles of free-living gallop.”

In the title story, Lovelace describes how General Patton, Yogi Berra, Andy Warhol, Howard Hughes, Bonnie Parker, and Archduke (take a breath) Franz Ferdinand Karl Anikò Belschwitz Mòric Bálint Szilveszter Gömpi Maurice Bzoch János Frajkor Ludwig Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen (why Giuermo, Strezpek, Pinche, and van Haverbeke are left off is never answered) like their eggs served. For instance, Billie Holiday likes hers

Sunny Side Up, inverted. Like two dreams dropped from a great height. Big and round and shiny and flat. Served with a glass of rusty tap water. Served fourteen minutes after cooking. While cooling. While cool.

And most astutely of all, Lovelace, recognizing the famed genius’s inscrutability, observes that “[n]o human being knows how Thelonius Monk likes his eggs.”

Sean Lovelace slips easily between fantasy and reality, enough to make your own world spin. Besides members of the Peanuts gang, Ingrid Bergman makes a salacious appearance in “A Sigh is Just a Sigh.” You’ll also find Humphrey Bogart, admonishing that “a man needs to face what he’s made for himself.” In another story, a lawnmower gives a man “a don’t-even-think-about-it” look. How convincing the pathetic (remember the term is not pejorative) fallacies, how easy to suspend disbelief here.

And while Lovelace is a trickster and a jokester, he’s also empathetic, for even when his stories pirouette, go pyrotechnic, and slip the stream, he goes beneath the surfaces of things and finds as much gold as he does mud, lava, and earthworms. In “Crow Hunting,” Lovelace waxes lyrical and the results are masterful. You can’t help but sway to this line describing reappearing crows: “that final image, spiraling frame, buckling wings and heart, the curvature of returning.” Like Anne Sexton’s eggs, these stories “bloom and bleed.” And if you squint, you too might just see “a peony, a water clock, a lioness clutching at a crow,” swimming inside of them.

You could call these short stories, “short shorts,” without, of course, that Nair commercial from the eighties rattling your brain case; better yet, call these “flash fictions.” Actually, no, these are the word made flash. To tweak a Hilaire Belloc quote, “just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable,” so it is with fiction. And with How Some People Like Their Eggs we get the best of both feasts: culinary and literary.

—John Madera

We don’t get to have it both ways; we can’t both deride our bestselling authors for being formulaic and automatically scorn their attempts to break out of the patterns that’ve served them so well. Alison Weir writes a historical novel and gets called a traitor to the Muse Clio; Thomas Pynchon writes a goofy stoner-gumshoe novella and gets bricks thrown at him in the pages of The Little Magazine; it isn’t fair – who are we to tell a successful writer, “no, no, stay right where you are so we can keep disparaging you”?

We get another chance to get it right with the release of Ford County, a collection of seven short stories by John Grisham. The author, as all the world knows, has written over a dozen legal thrillers that sell in their mindless gazillions. After producing a string of titles like The Appeal, The Summons, The Testament, and The Partner, Grisham could be reasonably suspected of having thoroughly surrendered to his whoredom – and yet, he’s also consistently wandered off-pasture, with non-jurisprudential novels like Skipping Christmas and Playing for Pizza. In Ford County, he tells several stories set in semi-rural Mississippi and is clearly aiming at that damned elusive sub-genre, “literary fiction.”

There are several problems with this, of course. Even leaving aside the fact that writing Southern fiction in America puts you in direct comparison (we won’t even speak of competition) with some of the greatest writers in the country’s literature, there’s the sad reality that writing muscles learn bad habits just as surely as weight-lifting muscles do; it’s arrogant for an author to think he can shed those bad habits just by adopting a drawl. It’s not just that Grisham doesn’t do much work to shed his legalese, although there’s that:

“Don’t quote me on that,” was a defensive ploy aimed at disclaiming what had just been said. Once properly disclaimed, others were free to go ahead and repeat what had just been said, but if the information turned out to be false, the original gossiper could not be held liable.

It’s more than that. “Literary fiction,” when it’s done well, is characterized by evocative settings, well-realized dialogue, and complex, satisfyingly lifelike characters. Successful legal potboilers don’t need any of those things, and writing those things well takes years and years of practice – and a certain amount of innate skill. You can’t achieve the same effect by having your characters interbreed like bunnies and then declaring a fiat, although Grisham tries:

“I figured out who she is. I’ve lived here for a long time, son, and I can’t remember much. But there was a time when most everybody knew who she was. One of her husbands was a cousin to one of my wives. I think that’s right. A long time ago.”

You gotta love small towns.

The whole point here is that you don’t gotta love small towns – the writer’s gotta make us love small towns, if that’s his goal. In legal thrillers, Grisham can simply tell us “she was mean,” and we’re expected to play along, to keep the story moving. In “literary” – that is, serious, adult – fiction, Grisham has to show us these things, and it’s no wonder he can’t really do it, considering how little practice he’s had.

We can’t fault him for trying in Ford County. There’s some good low-key comedy in this collection’s opening story, “Blood Drive,” for instance, and the best story, “Quiet Haven,” features as its narrator a nursing home grifter who inhabits an interesting moral grey zone that will satisfy all but the most fastidious short story reader. But there are far too many sassy waitresses, far too much Jim Beam in clinking glasses, far too many people reckoning instead of thinking – far too much caricature instead of character, in other words. The result feels like Southern-lite laptopped from a Chelsea loft during intermittent bursts of nostalgia.

The repair for this isn’t far to seek, but it’s clearly unpalatable to our yearning author. Grisham has written two full-length legal thriller novels in the last eight months, and there’s no reason on Earth not to think he’ll do the same thing in the next eight months. But if he’s serious about writing serious fiction – if he genuinely wants to reach that small slice of readers out there who’ve always disdained his very existence – he needs to take a couple of years off, do no legal thrilling, and try a little agonizing. We don’t get to have it both ways, but neither does he.

–Amanda Bragg

– Matthew Klane, “The Plains of Abraham”

Lo! Open Letters’ Contributing Editor Elisa Gabbert has launched a new fine issue of Absent Magazine, featuring poetry by OL alum Matthew Klane as well as two-dozen new poems by an array of interesting young poets. And while you’re there, check out the archives, containing poems by OL contributors and friends Kathleen Rooney, Peter Jay Shippy, Sampson Starkweather, Mark Wallace, Kate Schapira, and John Cotter & Shafer Hall. The new issue features work on love, leaving, John Brown’s legacy, Chinese cowboys, ice, mischief, gigolos, and, of course, autumn. And:

from “Jane’s First Husband” by Daniela Olszewsk:

He smiled amicably.
Claimed that cannon fodder.
Was making a comeback.

It was nothing personal.
He had many levels and layers.
On him. An heir to a tin can.

At first glance, you might think the release of Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men was timed to coincide with Hallowe’en, where furry, befanged face masks have been standard gear for decades. But such a thought would only prove you’re old, clueless, and, like, SO out of the loop. The target date for this newest addition to the great, endlessly diverting Mammoth Book series isn’t October 31st – it’s November 20th.

On November 20th, wolf men – or werewolves, as they’re less anachronistically known – stand a good chance of dethroning vampires as the new Hot Monster, thanks to a pint-sized actor named Taylor Lautner, who will star as the sexy werewolf Jacob in the movie Twilight: New Moon. That franchise so far as belonged to Robert Pattison, the weird-looking young thespian cast to play conflicted vampire heartthrob Edmund, but Lautner is an entirely more media-congenial studio creation – the paparazzi will never catch him smoking, he’s incapable of growing disheveled-looking stubble, and he has no penchant for Shanghai prostitutes of dubious provenance. He stands ready to eclipse his blood-sucking competition.

And The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men stands ready to introduce a potential tidal wave of new fans to the oldest monster in the playbook: the shape-changer. In his Introduction, indefatigable editor Jones says lycanthropes are the most tragic of monsters because the evil they do is entirely involuntary. This shows an unfamiliarity with werewolf literature that might be forgivable in a busy man (although perhaps less so in the editor of an anthology of werewolf lit), but as the majority of stories in this very good anthology show, the appeal of the werewolf concept lies in the fact that the change from straitlaced human behavior to the abandon of the wild is enthusiastically embraced by most of those who can do it. The original curse might come upon them involuntarily (meddling crones play a big part in this book), but the rest is Gravy Train.

Jones’ particular genius as a master of ceremonies is to assemble not just a collection of the moment but one for the ages. His Mammoth Book of Vampires, Mammoth Book of Dracula, and especially Mammoth Book of Terror are superbly-balanced menus of entertainment, and Wolf Men is another fine achievement. An anthology that boasts stories from both Neil Gaiman and Manly Wade Wellman is surely an anthology that knows what it’s doing.

There are many, many treats sandwiched between those two extremes. The volume features stories by Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, the great Kim Newman, Graham Masterson, and a dozen more, and the plots range from no-frills horror to mordant social commentary (with a good deal of, how to put it, bleeding between the two). Werewolf short fiction has been a staple of the horror genre for over a century, so Jones had a wide field to choose from in making his selections. True to form, he’s produced the best werewolf anthology on the market.

And the most gratifying little detail in that anthology? How well long-forgotten pulp writer Wellman holds his own against the whippersnappers who crowd the Table of Contents. His 1938 story “The Hairy Ones Shall Dance” features his recurring hero Judge Pursuivant, and it snaps and hustles as only the work of an old carnival barker can:

“Have a drink,” coaxed Judge Pursuivant, exactly as if I had had none yet. With big, deft hands he poured whiskey, then soda, into my glass and gave the mixture a stirring shake. “Now then,” he continued, sitting back in his chair once more, “the time has come to speak of many things.”

He paused, and I, gazing over the rim of that welcome glass, thought how much he looked like a rosy blond walrus.

“I’m going to show you,” he announced, “that a man can turn into a beast, and back again.”

Don’t wait for some super-popular kids movie to spark your lycanthropiana; grab this lively book and feast your full today.

–Khalid Ponte

Certain books infuriate in legitimate ways – a favorite author dawdles through his latest work, or an idiot pundit gets all his facts wrong, things like that. Other books infuriate because they can’t help themselves – if you go to Richard Patterson or Jodi Picoult for literary excellence, you deserve the heartburn you get.

But a few books infuriate in ways that are both illegitimate and entirely voluntary – books so horrifically wrong in their very nature that you read them with your guts heaving in rage … all the brutality of catharsis, but without the author’s intent, and so without any value.

Kevin Richardson’s Part of the Pride is a pure, appalling example of this kind of book. Richardson works in an animal park in South Africa, and he’s become something of an internet sensation as videos began to circulate of him caressing and clowning around with wild or semi-wild lions and hyenas. He’s known many of these animals since they were born, and he approaches them without weapons of even a defensive kind. Richardson has not lived in a cave these last ten years; he knows perfectly well that Roy Horn (half of the Vegas animal-act Siegfried & Roy) was mauled almost to death by one of the enormous tigers he’d known and trained from birth. He’s certainly read of Timothy Treadwell, who talked for years about feeling a “oneness” with the grizzly bears of Alaska – and then achieved the least desirable form of that oneness by being eaten by a grizzly bear. Richardson is a fool, but he’s not a big enough fool not to know what he’s doing.

Still, he writes appalling, enraging stuff like this about how he lays down the law to the hyenas:

I was tough with them and I used to rough them up, in the same way one hyena would assert dominance over another. I would tackle them to the ground and roll them around; I would lift them up off the ground under their arms and swing them around, and I would bit them on the ears. I had to do this with all the hyenas, to assert my position in the clan, because they all wanted to challenge me. I also had to be down at their level, and it was a battle of wills as much as teeth.

A battle of wills as much as teeth … you read stuff like that with your mouth hanging open, just incredulous. It cannot be a battle of wills, because a roiling crowd of excited hyenas doesn’t have a will in any comparative sense to what a solitary human possesses. And it cannot be a battle of teeth, because humans have tiny, ineffectual, cute, little round baby-teeth, and hyenas have four-inch incisors and carnassials that can grind bone to powder. Reading the words – written by someone who’s actually permitted to approach these animals, instead of being forbidden to do so under penalty of law – just trip-hammers the heart.

And then there are the lions, Richardson’s favorites among all his animal charges. Part of the Pride is full of astounding photos of Richardson playing with these enormous creatures, and there are dozens of passages in the book where Richardson expounds on what for lack of a better word we’ll call his philosophy:

With lions such as Tau and Napoleon, who I considered my brothers, I had developed a relationship based on trust and respect. I’d known them since they were six or seven months old and I had always related them as one of them, down in the grass at their level, rather than lording it over them with a stick or whip.

Trust and respect! You want to weep for this idiot.

Years ago, I was sitting on the rooftop of a farmer’s house on the border of a field in Namibia when a full-grown male lion walked out of the tall grass and down a stretch of road alongside the farmer’s property. The lion came to an old oil drum the farmer had put at the side of the road to mark a subdivision, and in a moment of feline pique I’m told house cats occasionally also display, the lion decided to move the oil can rather than walk around it. He swatted out once with his right front paw, an entirely negligent gesture – and the oil drum flew six or seven feet through the air and landed with a deep thud in the dust. When the lion was long gone, the farmer and I walked over to the drum and I tried to set it back upright. I couldn’t budge it, and when I asked the farmer why, he told me he’d filled it with rocks before he sealed it, to make sure it didn’t blow away. I’m guessing here, but I’d say the thing must have weighed 300 pounds.

So there is no doubt whatsoever what Part of the Pride actually is: it’s an extended suicide note (the first one ever to have a ghostwriter?), with colorful digressions and accompanying photographs and even a gruesome bit of foreshadowing to the next show-boating ignoramus whose odds and ends will find their way to some South African coroner’s table:

If something happens to me there is one guy who could continue to do the work I do with lions and hyenas, in the same way that I do. His name is Rodney Nombekana and he is a fantastic guy.

If something happens? You want to weep.

–Steve Donoghue

Hajdu makes some very good observations as he trots Crumb’s take on Holy Writ around the block, and although his overall impressions are positive:

Crumb’s book is serious and, for Crumb, restrained. He resists the temptation to go all-out Crumb on us and exaggerate the sordidness, the primitivism and the outright strangeness (by contemporary standards) of parts of the text. What is Genesis about, after all, but resisting temptation?

his conclusion (in strong, delightful prose) is more equivocal:

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs – they are kinds of beliefs, too – is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

Strong stuff, but is it the final word? Probably best to hold off on granting that status until you’ve read our November issue, in which Brad Jones turns in his own opinions of Crumb’s slice of the Old Testament.

Right in the middle of his analysis of Wolf Hall, he does one of those rhetorical repositionings the NYRB seems to like so much, the kind guaranteed to freeze up thy young blood: he stops and asks “What is a historical novel?”

But Greenblatt is such an invigoratingly smart writer that even such a line shouldn’t send his readers stampeding for the nearest exit (his review is bracketed by Bill Clinton on one side and open-heart surgery on the other, so there’s nowhere to run in any case). He not only scores some points with Open Letters by nodding deserved praise on such books as Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, H.F.M. Prescott’s The Man on a Donkey, Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning, and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, but he also manages to nail some of the assertions the best historical novels tend to have their characters make implicitly to their readers:

I am not a stick figure in a textbook; I was once alive, emotionally complex, beset with fears and daydreams, just as you are now. I will hide nothing from you. I will reveal to you what it actually felt like to experience in the flesh certain historical forces that are fixed in certain formulaic phrases: the Italian Renaissance, the English Reformation, the Irish Uprising. And I will do so in a way that will make you feel, in the midst of a sober conversation about court politics, the touch of the real: “Try one of these sugared almonds.”

Greenblatt’s verdict on Wolf Hall is that it’s superb. And what, you may ask, is the verdict of Open Letters’ own Tudor expert, “A Year with the Tudors” host Steve Donoghue? Read our November issue and find out!

For Gordon Teskey, author of the deliciously invigorating Delirious Milton, “a necessary first step” in the deciphering of any written work is finding out why it was written in the first place – and in his view, this is a trickier prospect than it appears, since from the moment a work comes into being, swarms of “interpreters” are constantly seeking to impose their own will on the picture that develops. The sinister dimensions of this can easily be seen even through the academia-speak that occasionally burdens Teskey’s prose:

When we ask what kind of being the interpreter is trying to establish for the work when proclaiming the mobility of its meaning through each generation of readers, we begin to see that the interpreter is concerned not at all with the meaning of the text – either right now or back then — but only with the authority of the interpreter himself, or herself, as the giver of meaning.

Luckily for Teskey’s readers (and anyone who has ever enjoyed — or been exasperated by — Milton should without delay make themselves his readers), there interpreters and there are interpreters. In Delirious Milton there is no tyranny, virtually no egotism, and a great scintillating profusion of ideas about Milton’s work.

The book is primarily concerned with three major late works, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, all written by an older and considerably disillusioned poet who was grappling with new forms and functions of poetry in a world that had changed out of all his reckonings. Cromwell’s revolution against the crown had ultimately failed, and had Milton’s eyesight, and the resultant looking-inward is what makes these three poems so great and so problematic; you never know quite what to do with the many hues of bitterness that suffuse all three works.

Much commentary has been written in the last few centuries on the subject of Milton’s artistic relationship to the great works of classical antiquity that were his school and his stalking-horse, and Teskey goes to the heart of the matter in citing the condemnation of those works by none other than Christ himself, in Paradise Regained, where in response to temptation by Satan, He makes scornful reference to that poetry’s “swelling epithets thick-laid/As varnish on a harlot’s cheek, the rest,/Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight”:

Apologies are made along one of the following two lines: that this is not classical culture in itself but classical culture as offered by Satan, and that this is Christ, not Milton, who is doing the rejecting. These apologies do not sit well together. Perhaps Milton was careful to insert the unbiblical temptation to classical learning so that there would be at least one temptation in the poem he himself would have found hard to resist, although after forty days in the wilderness without food, surely even Milton would have turned stones to bread, were he able to, and surely even Milton would admit this. But the passage needs no apology to explain it away. It says what Milton always thought: that in itself classical culture is worthless.

To say the least, most academic literary criticism doesn’t read like this at all. Delirious Milton may not be a work of textual criticism open to beginners (a sound familiarity with the poetry is the minimum entrance fee), but it’s nonetheless a very entertaining – and deceptively subverting – book, an immediate classic in Milton studies.

–Steve Donoghue

When Deborah Norville, at the beginning of her latest book The Power of Respect, writes that “No one is too unimportant to be ignored. No one is so significant that others don’t matter,” a reader can be justified in feeling a little queasy. Not because of the rather flagrantly terrible prose of the sentiment (although this, alas, holds true for the whole length of the book – any high school sophomore chosen at random could have written the thing better), but because it’s a hugely reasonable assumption that the author doesn’t actually practice what she preaches.

Norville is a celebrity, after all. Perhaps not of the Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt wattage, but still, a fairly glamorous public figure. She’s the anchor of Inside Edition, a published author and popular name on the lecture circuit. It’s overwhelmingly likely that she has assistants, flunkies, and minions; and assistants, flunkies, and minions often endure a paucity of respect from their boss. It’s virtually a job requirement: you will have unfair abuse hurled at you. Unless she’s the Virgin Mary, Norville has probably done her share of that kind of hurling, in the years since she’s become a public figure.

That’s where the queasiness comes in. If you’re going to sit through a 200 page lecture on being nice to people, it would be best if it came from somebody who has more daily success at being nice to people than, say, you do. It’s possible to suspect Norville of lapses, and when it comes to prescriptive morals, that matters.

Still, the book she’s written, though marred by theoretical hypocrisy and all-too-real bad writing, is ultimately helpful. Because Norville is entirely right in her underpinning assertion: giving people respect actually improves both the giver and the recipient. She traces the expression of the concept through many different everyday environments – schools, workplaces, homes – and ladles out an endless stream of anecdotes (this is unfailingly called “research,” but perhaps our author is a bit of a wag) all to the same effect: giving and getting respect noticeably enhances life. There’s even a biological element:

When you are feeling positive, your brain releases dopamine, the feel-good hormone often associated with a runner’s high. Your body’s dopamine receptors are located in the brain’s frontal cortex, the same part of the brain that is headquarters to cognitive reasoning functions. Just as stretching before a workout warms up your muscles to facilitate maximum function, positive affect “warms up” the cerebral frontal cortex, facilitating maximum cognitive function.

Despite this and other strained attempts to sound scientific, The Power of Respect is actually filled with useful information and even a few thought-provoking insights. There are frequent inserted inspirational quotes, there are handily summarized lists of bullet points, and there’s a particularly good section dealing with children (and of course dealing with the most obvious example of someone withholding respect, the school bully). An important reminder is no less important for being made so simply as this. Parents and teachers will find much aid and comfort in this book.

–Leah Lambrusco

At the close of Gone Over, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar’s rambunctious, fantastic historical novel, James DeWolfe, honorable senator from Rhode Island, addresses a fractious crowd:

“Washington, Franklin, Greene. Warren, Revere, Hancock, Adams. All gone. Long gone. The man we honor here today is a reminder of a time when gods walked among us. Men who fought not for personal gain but for honor and country. Who fought the War of Revolution that freed us from tyranny forever!”

The honoree here is Israel Potter, that vaguely Falstaffian figure in the history of the American Revolution, the raffish old hero of Bunker Hill. Potter first told the twisting, remarkable story of his life to Henry Trumbull, author and antiquarian son of poor benighted Norwich, Connecticut, and decades later Herman Melville found that same material irresistible and used it to write his Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Chacko and Kulcsar have been equally tempted, and the novel they’ve written deserves the widest possible readership. Calling this book one of the best historical novels of the year is only the beginning of the praise it deserves; in its wit, excitement, and sometimes mordant insight into human nature, it’s every bit the equal of Melville’s neglected classic.

The open secret at the heart of both books – and shining from every page of Trumbull’s original account – is that Israel Potter was, in the parlance of a later day, a big fat liar. The life story he spun is full of meetings with royalty, midnight encounters, hairsbreadth escapes … in short, all the things with which a man might fill his autobiography if he were reasonably sure there was nobody left in the world to contradict him. In Gone Over, Trumbull finds the aged Potter working in a whorehouse and induces him to tell his story, even though Potter is the first to warn him about that story:

“Let’s make a bargain, Mister Trumbull. I’ll tell you the truth, and we’ll decide what the world should know. Too much truth could lose me my pension, and you your reputation.”

“So your life is a scandal.”

“Worse,” he said seriously. “I’m a man without a country, or even a cause. It wasn’t that way in the beginning, though. We were just men who sailed to serve America. We put out from Plymouth in the brigantine Washington, but we were taken prisoner by the British and sent to England. That’s where this story begins. With a question. After a man sails past the gates of hell, what does he find?”

“You tell me.”

“Death or tomorrow,” he said without a smile.

Potter tells his story, and our authors work in a great deal of atmosphere and research in the pages that follow (they previously collaborated on an actual biography of Potter, to the extent such a thing is possible). Since Melville’s book is almost totally unknown to the modern reading public, readers won’t know that Chacko and Kulcsar are doing a bit of homage to Israel Potter by making Gone Over primarily a thrilling adventure story. Their Potter has more than his share of dangerous adventures, and all are narrated with a clean, knowing efficiency that would have pleased Robert E. Howard:

Israel heard a noise that for a moment overrode the sound of his own footsteps on the cobblestones. It was not other footsteps, but a higher, slicker sound that went on a bit longer than any sound like it.

Israel knew when he turned that he would be facing a sword, and that it would be the brightest thing in the narrow street at three-thirty in the morning.

It was that. He could see by the outline that it was a light dueling blade that made up in speed what it lacked in weight. Israel had nothing with him but the knife he had bought in Portsmouth. The only advantage he had was his familiarity with the weapon and his opponent’s ignorance of it.

“Close enough,” said Israel.

The recent success of HBO’s John Adams mini-series demonstrated that Americans are still fascinated by the actual lives their Founding Fathers lived, fascinated by the gaps, the human lacunae, in those storied biographies. Israel Potter lurks on the far fringes of the American pantheon, half-myth even to the men and women who knew him, and maybe that makes him all the more inviting. Certainly the old rascal himself would have been immensely pleased with the first-rate yarn our authors have spun in Gone Over. Do yourself a favor this autumn: skip the latest doorstop biography of Washington and read this wonderful book instead.

–Steve Donoghue

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, a collection of music-themed stories, has hit the states after garnering a friendly reception in the UK, and one of the first to greet the book is English emigrant Christopher Hitchens, who takes an hour from his busy schedule to review it for The New York Times. Hitchens’ piece is anchored by his respect for Ishiguro—he is one the many admirers of The Remains of the Day and A Pale View of the Hills—yet he finds something a little half-baked in these stories:

it is only fair to warn you that [Ishiguro] relies for much of his effect not on the slow metamorphosis of blue into gray but on bathos and sometimes on pure farce. In “Malvern Hills,” another guitarist, believing himself underappreciated in the metropolis, seeks a more tranquil life in the west of England and plays a nasty practical joke that has unintended consequences. The fact that he plays it on two holiday-making Swiss musicians is almost irrelevant: music itself has little to do with the narrative, and the three characters might as well have juggling or animal-training in common.

The problem, Hitchens diagnoses, is that these stories are too silly to yield any emotional depth, but not humorous enough to be very entertaining. Karen Vanuska, reviewing Nocturnes in Open Letters, agrees that the stories are often “more comic than tragic,” yet she finds that Ishiguro’s lighter touches nicely complement the close character observations he’s known for in his novels:

Nocturnes‘ is more akin to this year’s Pulitzer winner of linked stories by Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge; within each story is a character whose world shifts in sometimes surprising, sometimes subtle, but always stirring ways. Yes, each major character in Nocturnes is a variation on a similar theme of naiveté, but each story is fresh and works contrary to expectations.

Is the book for you? The complement of these two reviews should be enough to let you decide.

Bleak History

Veteran sci-fi and horror writer John Shirley’s new book Bleak History is set in a world exactly like our own – except it’s cloaked in a powerful energy field the Department of Homeland Security has dubbed AS (apparently supernatural), and it’s populated not only by denizens of that field (ghosts, demons, elementals, all inhabitants of “The Hidden”) but by otherwise-normal humans who can tap into that field in order to perform all manner of extraordinary feats.

Shirley’s main character, scruffy bad-boy bounty-hunter Gabriel Bleak, is one of the most powerful of those individuals, and consequently government agencies aren’t the only ones interested in either enlisting him or eliminating him – none of which matters to Bleak, who just wants to live his own life and not be bothered by anybody. Sci-fi novels being what they are, of course he doesn’t get that wish – the book’s vigorous and dramatic narrative quickly sweep him (and the reader) along. Shirley is really adept at depicting the allure Bleak’s power has for him:

He [Gabriel] watched in horror and fascination as the slow-motion wave of mind-energy rushed toward him. Had just time to think, I should run. I should hide from this!

But he wasn’t going to run. On some deep level, he knew he belonged in it. He was like a fish in an aquarium, rejoicing as it sees a flood pour into the house, the flood that will set it free.

And the onrushing tidal wave of the Hidden reared over him, a glassy wall of liquid energy … and crashed down all around him.

And while Bleak History has a slight weakness for particularly hackneyed plot devices (most readers will be neither surprised nor pleased to learn that Gabriel has a long-lost brother, for instance), it’s still one Hell of a ride. Highly recommended.

–Khalid Ponte

In the November issue of Vanity Fair, David Kamp turns in a very entertaining and informative piece on beloved American illustrator Norman Rockwell. The magazine’s editors chose the jarring and vaguely disquieting approach of displaying several iconic Rockwell paintings side-by-side with the photos from which the artist worked – some will see this as drastically, perhaps detrimentally demystifying the creative process (reducing it to a question of which nick-nacks Rockwell chose for the backgrounds, etc.), but the article’s real bone of contention comes from another kind of artistic demystification altogether. The question again arises about just how much of an influence Rockwell’s great predecessor J. C. Leyendecker had on the artist’s work – and how much of that influence was involuntary. Kamp writes that Laurence Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, in their book on Leyendecker, “suggest that Rockwell had something of a Single White Female complex about the elder artist, moving near him, befriending him, pumping him for contacts in the biz … and ultimately supplant[ing] his idol as the best-known cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post.” Readers noting Schick’s tone of doubt are encouraged to read Steve Donoghue’s review of the Cutlers’ book in our December 2008 issue and perhaps decide for themselves…

Open Letters extends a hearty congratulations to Hilary Mantel, whose novel Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize. And surely the heartiest vote of thanks comes from Steve Donoghue, author of our “A Year with the Tudors” feature, where excerpts from Wolf Hall were given their very first critical appraisal anywhere. Donoghue loved what he read of Wolf Hall back then, so the fact that it won one of literature’s most sought-after prizes is bound to make him even more insufferable than usual. You can read his early assessments here and here, and you can read his full-length review of Mantel’s book in our upcoming November issue.

Latrinae et Foricae:
Toilets in the Roman World

It’s physically impossible to read this book without giggling. This is most emphatically not a criticism.

Barry Hobson has written the best, most comprehensive popular survey-style account of toilets in the Roman world ever produced, and he’s perfectly aware – indeed, how could he of all people not be? – that his subject provokes certain involuntary responses. In his opening pages, he concentrates on one such reaction, something a bit more serious than giggling:

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In the discussion of this subject it is hard to avoid the use of terminology which might be offensive to some. There are aspects of the study of human excrement which may give rise to disgust.

But readers should put aside any such disgust – and stop that giggling – because Hobson’s subject is, in fact, not only fascinating but illuminating, starting with his book’s very title: the distinction between foricae, or multi-seater public toilets, and latrinae, or single-seat private (or even semi-private) toilets. The divide between the two is not only the divide between wealth and poverty but also between hydrological technology and the lack of it, between concepts of privacy and their lack, and the differences between cultures that place a high value on the prompt, systematic removal of dirt, garbage, and even excrement and those that don’t. It’s not idle to study these things, nor is it irresponsible; toilets, it turns out, can do more than provide joke material for Petronius and Martial. голова болит секс голова болит секс

Hobson deals with those writers, of course – his book touches on virtually every ancient mention having anything to do with toilets – and he spends a lot of time investigating Pompeii and Herculaneum, where evidence of his specialty is better preserved than anywhere else. He examines graffiti, decoration, architecture, innovations, and he does it all with a precise scholarly tone perhaps just slightly exaggerated to compensate for the sniggering coming from the back of the classroom:

The Romans have deservedly earned a reputation for sub-street sewage systems, but it is important to understand exactly what constituted toilet drains since there is a modern tendency to define a sewer as a drain conveying faecal material. In fact the passage of sewage into pipes flowing in Roman cities was by no means the norm. голова болит секс

There is less grandeur in Latrinae et Foricae than you’ll find in a study of legions or high deeds of state, but Hobson’s steady implication – the obvious truth that his subject concerns every single Roman who ever lived, from Augustus Caesar on down – is incontrovertible, and that makes his book fascinating. As a contribution to the study of ancient Rome, it does its humble duty with consummate efficiency – giggling or no giggling.

–Steve Donoghue

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