On July 6, 1944, a fire at a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus in Hartford, Conn., killed 168 people and injured several hundred more. That real-life tragic event binds The Greatest Show, a solid collection of interconnected short stories by Michael Downs, a former Hartfordite and author of a previous book about his native city. In this latest work—a maiden volume of fiction—Downs retains a reportorial objectivity in which facts are meticulously observed and stories are presented chronologically—beginning with “Ania,” at the scene of the ’44 fire, and ending with “History Class,” during the George W. Bush years. In part because these stories stretch over an extended period of time and because the lives of Downs’s working-class characters are so intertwined, The Greatest Show also has a novelistic feel—a novel-in-stories, perhaps—though the stories themselves operate well as stand-alone pieces.

Hartford is one of those formerly robust American manufacturing cities that is often overlooked—like Rochester, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, et al—and similarly, the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire seems to have been reduced to an historical footnote or a party-conversation curiosity. The fire is of course important to Downs’s stories, but its centrality to the collection is less certain than it might seem. These are indeed stories about suffering, memory, and human frailties and limitations; however, the fire is more an inside-section newspaper item than the singular emotional and psychological headline moment that defines the lives of most of its characters.

That suffering is “managed” by them with a blue-collar stoicism, a detached pragmatism, or an ethnic Roman Catholicism typical of the time and place. These are difficult things to render dramatically in fiction, but Downs accomplishes it. Marriages—good, bad, and so-so—carry on. Families grow, and labor is attended to. In most of these stories, the characters have already moved on from the circus fire with a matter-of-factness that speaks to their class and circumscription. An exception is “Ex-Husband, Years Removed”—perhaps the best story in the collection—in which grief is expressed with a complexity that captures, in an artful way, sudden tragic death and its colossal emotional remainder. The other stories are historically linked not as much to the horrific fire but to a certain imagined version of twentieth-century America, and to a mid-sized U.S. city now long past its heyday. Which is to say, these are realistic stories of ordinary people who lived in Hartford (the “Insurance Capital of the World”), ca. 1944-2004.

To this point, the primary character in The Greatest Show is a circus-fire survivor with no memory of the infamous blaze. “In his mind, he was born with the scars that crisscross his body,” the reader is told in “History Class,” as well as in other stories. “‘It’s a blessing that you don’t remember,’ his mother used to say. For years he believed her and never pushed for more than the spare details she offered, settling instead for glimpses he dreamed that vanished as he woke.” He is Ted Liszak, who was a toddler at the time of the fire. We learn about him first in “Ania,” a fine story in which the title character—an unhappy Polish housekeeper whose husband is away at war—steals circus tickets from her employer and takes her three-year-old son (Ted) to the doomed performance. Mother and boy survive, but they are badly injured.

Michael Downs

At times Ted’s muteness and unknowingness regarding the fire can be frustrating—but it’s not fatal to the collection. Only in “At The Beach”—when Ted first meets his second wife, Rosa, during a weekend getaway—does his inability to recollect this most-integral part of his personal history have a negative effect on a story. In fact, in “History Class,” the last story in the collection, Ted fibs and creates a memory of the fire, for a stranger. This lie is reminiscent of when Ted’s father Charlie, in “Elephant,” invents a circus-revenge tale for the benefit of a teenaged Ted (and for himself?), as if memories, if we so choose, can be conjured from nothing, like in a center-ring magic trick. Earlier in “History Class,” Ted visits a high school to deliver an eyewitness account of the long-ago Hartford tragedy. But what could he possibly say about it? He brings along a laminated newspaper headline, singed shoelaces, and the actual circus tickets. But as in other stories here, it is Ted that is the show-and-tell item. His scars are there to be observed, and he offers them as evidence to the students, but his injuries are mere physical manifestations, not something to be felt emotionally by him.

In the title story, Ted returns again to Hartford—this time to attend the circus for the first time since 1944. The trip also marks his 60th birthday. The circus performance is scheduled, improbably, for September 11, 2001. As a result, all performances have been cancelled for the week. But after being told who Ted is, circus management and the gathered performers agree to put on a special show. After all, according to post-’44 circus tradition, “Hartford always gets a little extra.” This non-Ringling Brothers performance is at first solely for Ted and Rosa but passersby soon wander in once they hear the circus sounds, unaware that this impromptu show is for one of the last survivors of the Hartford Circus Fire. All of this seems a wee bit contrived. Yet what’s interesting about “The Greatest Show” is its payoff, as I see it: that is, just how little wonderment and excitement and imagination this modern-day circus elicits. From the point of view Downs uses to describe the scene, it is almost as if the circus itself has been scarred or deadened, and so it fails to transmit the full joyous amazement that circuses purportedly offer.

But the shows go on, as the well-worn dictum states, because they must. The city survived the ’44 Circus Fire, though it declined afterward along with other cities in the northeastern United States. Characters in The Greatest Show—young people in 1944—grow old then elderly, their kids go off to college (or not), and often sons and daughters move to “better places” in the South and West. Hartford—as it was, a place once known to them—dies off. Old-timers die off too, and so do their traditions. But the city persists, because the greatest show is not a circus but life itself.

And so, “real” memories coupled with real everydayness: Nick DiFiore, an aging prizefighter whose sister was killed in the fire, now battles dementia and his own decrepit body, in “Boxing Snowmen.” His loyal wife Lena cares for him, and worries fiercely about Nick. They never left Hartford. When a snowstorm interferes with the air-travel plans of their visiting son, Nick is angered and disappointed, and he retreats to his loyal recliner. “He drifted toward his own sleepy memory: of his sister the day before she died—in a fire so many decades past that no one talked about it anymore. They had met that day on Main Street outside Sage Allen’s department store, an accident of chance that inspired her to throw her arms around him and laugh in his ear, leaving her lipstick on his lobe. She wiped it away between her forefinger and her thumb; the next day she vanished in a fire. In the world, then out.”

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When so-called grownups retrace their younger days, they sometimes realize they might not have been so naive after all. Everything they once believed and lived, everything they once felt, was authentic and perhaps even correct. The abandonment of youthful notions was inevitable and necessary. In that, there is sadness, but also memories that are not nostalgic but hard-won and very real. The Dutch fiction writer Nescio presents readers with this human experience, in lyric prose and simple tales, told through his mostly male characters—writers, poets, painters, layabouts, drifters, low-level office workers—as well as his impressionistic descriptions of long-ago Amsterdam, which he clearly loved. A selection of his work is now being offered for the first time in English, translated from the Dutch by Damion Searls and published by New York Review Books under the title Amsterdam Stories.

Nescio’s real name was Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh, and he was born in 1882. His life story can be summarized this way: a young writer and idealist, son of a shopkeeper/blacksmith, quickly relegates himself to a life of striving businessman. Supporting a young family, he spends his early and middle years in artistic obscurity, employing a pen name that means “I don’t know” in Latin, in part to protect an executive position at the Holland-Bombay Trading Company. He writes very little. Stories are published pseudonymously in his native the Netherlands, but “success” eludes him on the literary front. After retiring as company director in 1937, due to a nervous condition, he still doesn’t write very much. Instead he pursues other activities, including long walks around Amsterdam and its surrounding countryside. He dies in 1961, near the time that a compilation of his work, Above the Valley, is published in Holland. His stature in his homeland grows steadily afterward. In 1996 his collected works are published, in two volumes, one of which is a nature diary he kept during excursions around the Netherlands during the years 1946 through 1955—to the delight of his newly adoring native audience.

And now the English-reading world has Amsterdam Stories, a very slim book of fiction, mostly because Nescio’s oeuvre is very slight. He is best known for a mere three “major” short works: “Dichtertje,” “De uitvreter,” and “Titaantjes.” These stories—sometimes referred to as novellas—are translated to the English here as “Little Poet,” “The Freeloader,” and “Young Titans.” There are six additional pieces in the volume, as well as fragments and unfinished work; the most notable of these is “Insula Dei,” which takes place in the Netherlands during World War II, and is the only longer piece Nescio completed during his lifetime besides his three “major” ones.

Despite a limited output, Nescio is revered in Holland today, and he rests firmly in the modern Dutch canon. Overall, the pieces included here vary in efficacy but each entry in Amsterdam Stories contains mad bursts of poetry and bitterness. These are works of knowing resignation, driven by an open resentment at indifferent gods and class and social restrictions, as well as keen observation and a love for nature and the friendships of young men, and an acknowledgement of time’s continuum and its great limitations.

Nescio’s stories are loosely linked, and characters appear and reappear, including the five friends who debut as a group in “Young Titans”: Hoyer and Bavink, aspiring painters and unapologetic loafers; Bekker, who dreams of a life on the heath outside Amsterdam where he plans to not “do anything”; Kees Ploeger who hangs around aimlessly with the guys; and lastly, Koekebakker—narrator, budding writer, Nescio/Grönloh stand-in.

These young men spend their idle time smoking cigars, drinking Dutch gin, reading Dante, taking excursions to the ring of dikes that surround Amsterdam, and talking to and—mostly—about girls (“And so it was: God showed his face and then hid it again. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces”). Those with steady jobs have nothing but contempt for their bosses. The “gentlemen of Amsterdam” possess all the power—over society, over their minions, over almost everything—and yet these gentlemen are incapable of feeling what God had deposited only in the heads, hearts and spines of five young Amsterdammers, or so they believed. Koekebakker—writing from an older position—knows better than this, but he dispenses light judgment on his earlier self and on his old friends. “We were kids—but good kids,” he tells the reader at the outset. “We would show them how it should be. ‘We’: that meant the five of us. Everyone else was ‘them,’ the ones who didn’t see it, didn’t get it. ‘What?’ Bavink said. ‘God? You want to talk about God? Their pot roast is their God.’ Other than a few ‘decent fellows’ we despised everyone—and secretly, I still think we were right.”

Very quickly these poor young men are reaching that critical juncture in life that decides everything, though they are heedless to this fact. Divergent paths, almost predetermined, take shape and they follow them obediently, into adulthood, arriving in the bourgeoisie if they’re lucky, embracing marriage and family, and obeying the beckon of a steady paycheck. Simply put, it is a story of where Hoyer, Bekker, Ploeger, Koekebakker and Bavink end up by their middle twenties, and this is all the reader needs to know, because everything important in the lives of these characters happens by that point. Everything after can almost go unsaid. This is particularly true for Bavink, who goes mad (the reader is given this fact in the story’s fourth sentence), though Bavink’s insanity is what leads to his greatest “success.” In the end though, this familiar story—an older man looking back on youth—is not overly judgmental or maudlin. It is also not a valedictory or a postmortem or a celebration. It is clear-eyed and resolute.

Overall, there is a certain density of detached emotion to these Amsterdam stories, but they never smother. They are indeed doleful, but they are also hopeful and in spots, I think, very amusing. Observations on a rigid, pressurized Dutch society are countered by descriptions of the city’s natural and man-made beauty as well as a sharp chronicling of human foibles. These are melancholic stories that are never sentimental, always stoic, and very often poetic (“The Valley of Obligations”—all of 140 words—is essentially a prose poem). There are beautiful paragraphs throughout this volume.

In the “The Freeloader” the reader discovers perhaps Nescio’s greatest invention: the title character, also known as Japi (pronounced “Yoppy”; no surname). The first line of the story is famous, because it is very funny, and if a reader enjoys this sentence, I daresay he or she ought to read every story in this book, because it serves as a litmus test on Nescio (as does the excellent opening to “Little Poet,” for that matter—very funny). The second paragraph in “The Freeloader”—shifting suddenly from first-person to second—grabs the reader’s attention; after the third, with Koekebakker again as narrator, Japi does the rest of the work.

“Little Poet” is quite different from Nescio’s other stories. It is an odd tale of courtship and marriage and the little poet’s scandalous affair with his sister-in-law, observed by god and devil alike. But “Little Poet” is more than its plot: it is lyrical and satirical, the funniest of the three majors, and the most developed. It was also the final one to be written. Just as his Greek counterparts might, the “God of the Netherlands” in this story looks down on the little poet, literally and figuratively, and as the little poet’s predetermined comic tragedy plays out, Nescio joins the fun as well, inserting himself into the story to mock and satirize little poets everywhere, and this one specifically (“Why did God ever make anyone a little poet?”). Years and events pass and what happens to a little poet doesn’t seem very consequential at the end, but of course it is.

In Nescio’s Amsterdam stories the concept of time is important, and its passage is marked by transitory changes in fashion, technology, landscapes, and language use, as duly noted by the narrator. The reader is informed that “consumption” has become “tuberculosis”; a tinsmithing business is now known as an “enterprise.” Cars appear suddenly in Amsterdam. Women’s dress changes; men’s, not as much. But Nescio’s underlying universal themes remain intact; his marvelous, century-old stories seemingly continue to the present day. As Koekebakker reports in “Young Titans”: “It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It’s only for us that the time is long since past.”

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This postscript is from a Lefsetz Letter.

Bob Lefsetz has been writing and sending his letters for more than twenty-five years. Mostly the subject is music or the music industry, though not always, and he’s a pretty outspoken critic.

Yesterday he reviewed Cheryl Strayed’s Wild:

“I’ll admit I was interested because of the adventure angle, young twentysomething decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. But that’s not why I loved this book, why I could not put it down, why I spent all weekend reading it.

But I got a lot of insight into the female mind. And it was fascinating to see life from the perspective of another, whose upbringing was not the same. We’re all too often living in a cocoon. We read about people richer or poorer, victims of tragedy, but not those just like us but…different.”

Full text of the review at the Lefsetz Letter archive.

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A quote from Tonino Guerra, in a New York Times obituary about an extraordinary life. Guerra, the prolific screenwriter, poet, novelist and artist, died on Wednesday in northern Italy, at age 92.

Among others, he collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Theo Angelopoulos, and wrote Antonioni’s famous trilogy L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse as well as Fellini’s 1973 classic Amarcord.

Son of a fishmonger father and an illiterate mother (whom Guerra himself taught to read and write), he was a poet initially and received his first film credit at age 36, and he continued to work into his eighties. “I believe I have given a little bit of poetry to all the directors I worked with,” he’d said.

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Sullivan’s essay hurtles across Ireland’s rich literary, political, economic, and religious histories, and he intertwines this with a candid personal one: a boy whose near-blind father read Joyce to him in a basement in Indiana, a poor student living in Cork city in the early 1990s, a man in his late thirties touring a place formerly known as the Celtic Tiger, a mature writer trying to discern what almost every reader also is: what’s ahead?

The Times’ slide show of Irish “ghost estates” says a lot, but Sullivan’s essay says a whole lot more.

He spent time on the Aran Islands, in the company of a Ukranian barman, and Sullivan surveys the consequences of the changes that ancient place underwent during the boom years, when fishermen traded in their boats for tourist vans. Like many Irish-American writers, Sullivan prizes all the Irish ones. Take John Millington Synge, who spent several summers on the Aran Islands in the late 1890s. The island people Synge met there populate his plays. “My Debt to Ireland” ends with a note on Synge’s “In the Shadow of the Glen,” which is about an aging farmer who feigns his own death in order to test the loyalty of his young wife. Sullivan writes of the critical, brief speech by the tramp at the end of that one-acter:

“It was reminiscent of Christy’s speech from the ending of [“The Playboy of the Western World”], and of countless other passages in Synge. It’s the great discovery he made in his study of the Irish character—the idea of survival as an act of imagination. Against the unacceptability of the void, he pits the howl of irrational humor and the keen. He was too dignified to apologize much for his work to hostile critics, but he might have said, in response to the charge that he was aloof from the true rural Irish, that he shared their unforgotten paganism.

“People said he made clowns of the peasants—there are still writers who complain that his dialogue wasn’t always true to real Irish folk speech, a criticism that manages to be correct while driving past his achievement, which was to go beneath them, into something even older and deeper, the Greeks. He possessed the mercenary instinct of the artist and sought not to capture the Irish language but to mine it for his English sentences. He had in him something of Gabriel, from “The Dead,” who when chastised for not wanting to visit the Aran Islands and learn his own native tongue, answers sourly, ‘Irish is not my language.’ In his room here at the inn, they say, Synge lay on the floor with his ear to the boards, listening to the talk of the people below, making notes. Out of that stuff he made plays that caused riots in multiple countries.”

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—E.L. Doctorow, in an essay adapted from his introduction to Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958–2008, by John Leonard (edited by Sue Leonard), to be published in March by Viking Penguin.

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Here are a few of his judgments:

“I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time”—about The Catcher in the Rye

“Try and read it, I think it is important”—re: The Stranger

“Damned good piece of work”—The 628-E8 by Octave Mirbeau

“I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then”— about Kafka’s The Castle

“I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”—Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest.

You can read more here.

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Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.

Many of the female characters in Crash and Tell, Lori Baker’s new collection of stories, yearn for experiences and lives they’ve envisioned for themselves but cannot possibly have. Instead action often occurs in the creative minds of these characters: a photographer, an illusionist, a library assistant, a middle-aged seaside tourist, a car-accident-victim pushover, a fictionalized Jane Goodall, and others. Dreams and memories complement plot. Conjecture runs parallel with narration. A pervasive aloofness creates a buffer between them and their sterile existence, as well as an emotional distance from the reader.

Yet in these mostly sardonic tales, Baker’s characters are reasonably (if ironically) self-aware. The stories are also, in general, wickedly amusing and Baker’s writing is both precise and quirky. Word choices often surprise but they also work in context. These are misfit stories after all and esoteric terms here and there rightly emphasize the absurdities facing her oddball protagonists. Every woman here is lost or searching or patiently waiting for life to come to her—rarely do they get what they want, if they even know what they want. They’re bourgeois pawns of their own (or their mothers’) making—with one character even happily recycling sad clichés.

“The Coming of Age of Jane” is one of the stronger pieces in the collection. In it, Baker fictionalizes Jane Goodall and re-imagines her as a debutante from Chevy Chase, Maryland who cannot escape her demanding, often inappropriate mother. In fact, Jane’s mother has literally followed Jane to her jungle encampment, and she and Jane openly battle for the attention and affections of Harry Morrison—an older fellow scientist—in a very primitive way.

Observing ape behavior as a statement on its evolved human version might be too obvious a ploy—or it might quickly devolve into schlock—for a lesser writer, but Baker diffuses this problem by properly structuring the story, then acknowledging its artifice. She also makes the story very funny; the reader is in on the joke.

He’s “slyly Jesuitical in manner, with a sort of dip-and-tarry gait that suggests lameness, although his appearance is otherwise robust.” This quote comes from one of Jane’s journal entries, which comprise the story and allow for Jane’s clinical human-ape observations (replete with drawings of the chimps). In this entry, she’s describing not Dr. Morrison but another male primate she’s been closely watching—an ape named “Marty.” Very soon Jane herself starts to resemble not the real Jane Goodall but perhaps Lady Greystoke, or Jane of Tarzan fame—a damsel in distress—and then ultimately “Lulu,” one of Jane’s female chimp subjects.

Lori Baker

Modified modern-day damsels abound in this collection: Jane; Virginia in “Crash and Tell”; Beryl in “At Sea”; Natalie in “Ghost Story”; Maria in “Experimental Maria.” These women are caught in a whirlpool of Crock-Pots, ne’er-do-wells, and pre-feminist expectations. Virginia, for one, is placed in peril’s way by the devilish Lenny, who drives a “brand-new bright red Lincoln Continental…around town like a fifty-thousand-dollar penis.” He purposely “pokes” Virginia’s car in order to get her “vitals”; he leaves her with the mistaken impression that they’d been involved in a car accident. Later Lenny asks Virginia to Wonderland, and this will be the first date she’s been on in years. It’s a “big deal” and something to mention at her next group-therapy session.

What follows might have otherwise been the grim tale of sad-sack Virginia but this story—like others in the collection—is buoyed by Baker’s humorous treatment and her sharply cynical viewpoint. It is immediately apparent that Lenny is a low-level criminal type—with his odd manner and speech, his “thoroughbred ferrets,” and his gambling problems and shady dealings. Well, this is obvious to the reader if not to Virginia, who is handicapped by low self-esteem, zero confidence, a plainly advertised desperation, and hyper-hypersensitivity. She’s a damsel, but there is no hero to save her from the villain. In net effect, the villain and the hero here are the same, and only Virginia is (ironically) unaware of this. Lenny fails to show up on time for their first date. Virginia imagines that he’s been killed in a car accident. When he does arrive later that night, Virginia is unprepared and she scolds herself. This is what she deserves for “imagining wreckage.” In the end though, what she’s undone by is a lack of imagination as well as a desire to quell her own loneliness.

“Still Life” is the energetic and ethereal opening story to Crash and Tell. Along with “The Coming of Age of Jane” and the title work, it forms the first and stronger half of this six-story collection. “Still Life” centers on an eccentric extended family of photographers and their cousin Louise, an illusionist whose performances enchant, befuddle and infuriate this tight-knit clan. One of Louise’s greatest performances leads to an irrevocable estrangement. Afterward the narrator retreats to a humdrum life as staff photographer for the local newspaper. Several years later, she encounters Louise by chance, but her cousin quickly disappears again. The narrator concludes that “Louise herself is lost among the words, which are themselves nothing more than representations, insubstantial as a scattering of moths. And so I imagine for her, a life of creative irresponsibility far removed from my own more prosaic but irreproachably real world of parades, supermarket openings, and portraits of the mayor.”

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Memory is a protean thing.

There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but the room is more than the recognizable objects therein. And this might be what memory is: fleeting, inexplicable, overpowering, capricious, unreliable, and also concrete. And sometimes memory is all these paradoxes (and more) at the same time.

Hiding Places: Memory in the Arts attempts to explore this rich and confounding topic—memory—through the work of more than fifty artists, in an exceptional exhibition that will run through December 30, 2011. An installation of Mark Fox’s Dust (2008) is just one highlight of the show. Over the course of two years Fox—using acrylic and ink on paper—drew 2,000 of his personal belongings, and these drawings are affixed with metal pins to a fifteen-foot-high wall collage-like (detail of Dust). The effect is a powerful yet oddly calm tornado of context and connections.

There are also fascinating pieces by George Widener, Kendall Messick, Masumi Hayashi, Gregory Blackstock, and William Powhida, who attempted to draw every person he’d met in his lifetime in Everyone I’ve Ever Met From Memory (that I can remember). David Maisel’s photographic series of copper canisters, Library of Dust, is a testament not to the remembered but to the forgotten. The photographed urns hold the unclaimed cremated remains of psychiatric patients from the Oregon State Hospital (1883-1970); water damage over the years had transformed the urns into beautiful objects in their own right.

The show itself is divided into four categories (From Memory, Holding Memory, Forget Memory, and Shared Memory), and there are nearly too many superb pieces to list—as I remember. Check out the show yourself, if you’re in the vicinity of Sheboygan this fall, or visit online.

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Lebowitz (or simply, Fran) was rediscovered, it seems, by the Newspaper of Record (and others) after Public Speaking, Martin Scorcese’s HBO documentary about her was released late last year, and it’s no wonder. Fran’s a bullhorn. She speaks freely about what New York has devolved into these last decades, and she’ll say what a lot of residents want to say about their own city but, oddly, very often won’t.

Some examples:

“The West Village now is like Westchester…The difference between Greenwich, Conn., and Greenwich Avenue, is zero.”

“Someone recently said to me, ‘Fran, you know, if we were young, we’d live in Brooklyn.’ And I said, ‘Not me, I was never that young.’”

“[The pedestrian mall in Times Square] makes New York seem like a failed Rust Belt city, where they are trying to…bring people downtown to a mall where no one shops because the factory closed. It is the opposite of an urban environment.”

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