There are still many places in the world where electricity is a luxury and bandidos regularly assert power over powerless villages, where a plate of beans has to suffice as daily bread, and the lure of Hollywood cowboys and television heroes encourages the imagination to believe in fantasies. Escapism is a form of hope.

The men of Tres Camarones, the dusty pueblito in Sinaloa, Mexico at the center of Luis Alberto Urrea’s new novel, Into the Beautiful North, have escaped to the U.S. The fantasy was, the men cross the border, acquire riches, and return to the land of lagoons and mangrove swamps to spread the wealth. But after braving the dangerous, illegal crossing and vanishing into the empty expanses and hyped-up culture of “Los Yuinaites,” it is the rare man who comes back home.

“The modern era had somehow passed Tres Camarones by, but this new storm had found a way to siphon its men away, out of their beds and into the next century, into a land far away.” The men are gone. The women, teenagers, dogs, and children are on their own against thieves, darkness, and loneliness. Luckily, with the help of Diós and Tía Irma, who is running for mayor, these plucky characters continue to dream.

Romantic and bored, inspired by the local Cine Pedro Infante showing of The Magnificent Seven, in which a group of brave peasants is sent north to the U.S. to bring seven men back, the women of Tres Camarones start to envision a future with their men once again among them: “Dances. Boyfriends. Husbands. Babies. Police – law and order. No bandidos.” With the blessing of Tía Irma, a foursome of local teens decides to go searching for the town’s men—La Vampi, the one goth in Tres Camarones; Tacho, a pretty gay boy with blond gel-spiked hair; Yolo, short for Yoloxochitl, a Nahuatl name given by her father who “had made it through one year of university and was thus well connected to his Toltec past;” and Nayeli, who secretly aspires to find her long-lost father. Since he left for the beautiful north, Nayeli’s father has sent her one taunting postcard, from Kankakee, Illinois, a scrap of cardstock now creased with longing.

The four leave the familiar comforts of their little hometown on a bus to Tijuana, where they find a world shockingly different from their fantasies. “The USA didn’t look as nice over there as it did on television.” From there, they forge bravely into the heart of the U.S., from Colonia Libertad, “the notorious launching pad for a million border-crossings” to Las Vegas (“CELINE DION!”), and onward to Kankakee. In Urrea’s telling, it is the United States that seems like a foreign land: “As soon as you escaped the island of neon and cement, the whole world was charred ruins, hoodoos and spires, dust devils and drooping power lines. Shreds of truck tires like fat black lizards. Smears of fur and brown blood upon the blacktop.”

In his introduction to Light from a Nearby Window, a collection of Mexican poetry, Juvenal Acosta discussed how contemporary Latino literature departs from the magic realism of previous generations of authors: “Earlier Mexican writers have felt it their task to interpret the enigma of mexicanidad. If defining Mexican literature was a challenge for Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, the poets of our time, beneficiaries of those efforts, situate themselves more naturally in the world they have inherited. Without this problem of identity, they have been able to set about their work in a more relaxed way.” Urrea, born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, embodies this more relaxed aesthetic, bringing comic attitudes and fantastic intentions to his eleven books, and juxtaposing the stereotypes of old Mexico against a new millennium of Google, vampires, Johnny Depp, and YouTube. Into the Beautiful North examines the way new generations of Mexicans are pre-Americanized, though their images of El Norte can’t prepare them for the crazy—and dangerous—encounters they’ll find in the real thing. Liberally dosed with references to Diddy and Kanye West, nostalgia for Yul Brynner and “Estip McQueen,” it’s a novel about our continent and our times, about the coexistence of old and new cultures, of north and south, and how they intermingle, fight, come of age, and ultimately change each other.

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In Patrick Somerville’s novel, an expectant father must decide what kind of man he wants to be.

The book cover, with a wooden rocking cradle and baby shoes dangling from its corner, conjures baby boys, boys who become men, men who become fathers… the ongoing cycle.

The man in Patrick Somerville’s novel, The Cradle, is right in the thick of that terrific, life-altering stage of life when his pregnant wife is about to deliver her miracle. He is present for her as onlooker and provider and partner: at her beck and call, basically. In her eighth month, her power at its peak, Marissa makes a teensy request of Matt: She wants their baby to sleep in the very same Civil War-era cradle she slept in as a baby. She believes that the cradle might be found somewhere among her mother’s possessions.

This might be an easy assignment, except Marissa’s mother left home long ago and no one knows where she lives. Marissa wants no part in finding her, seeing her, or reconnecting with her—she just wants Matt to take care of her and provide this one thing. She believes that the cradle matters and she will not take no for an answer. Matt acquiesces, as that is his role, and so begins the quest.

Where has Marissa’s mother gone and why? “She’d left Marissa and Glen because she was going to start again somewhere else. Her version of escape was to begin. It was simple, but it left damage behind that she had to keep moving away from. What kind of woman, Matt wondered, would do this? What kind of person?”

Patrick Somerville

Everything is fraught at this moment in the man’s life, as he looks ahead to fatherhood and back at childhood. The road trip brings up Matt’s own past for his consideration: what was lost, what he never had in the first place. “If Matt went way way way way back, he could remember things. Not a lot…. That far back, he’d been so young that he didn’t know any better than to accept whatever happened as the same thing that happened to everybody.”

The novel’s conceit—the search for the cradle—seems flimsy at first, until it becomes entangled with the stories of Matt’s uneasy early years in foster homes and with the mute and unloved boy he meets on his quest. Much of the novel deals with Matt’s choices—he and Marissa want to move into the next phase of life free of the troubled past. So why go looking for trouble? He can buy a wooden cradle anywhere. He could lie and show up with a reasonable facsimile. But Matt is not a liar or a nihilist. He thinks about all the adults who didn’t love him growing up, about how he has survived his own life:

“He had scrubbed himself clean of it. He had literally spent years tearing out his own insides, all of his twenties spent removing everything that had come before… What had scared him even more, then, was giving it to somebody else, either passing down to a child or transferring it sideways, to someone he loved.”

He has to decide how to live now, what kind of man he wants to be:

“Was it not obvious then, what this other feeling was… when he rushed through the carved passages of all that old pain, but rushed through them without the pain. Instead just existed and allowed himself to be what he was and what he had been at the same time. The divots and the paths and the channels that were there inside him were not malleable. Rather, it was what ran through them that was malleable.”

With The Cradle, Patrick Somerville offers a novel about the many layers of the self—what is found and what is lost and found again. It’s a Midwestern story, with the cold, dank, wide open mystery of abandoned prairies at its hopeful heart.

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Set inside New York City’s hip-hop scene and the surrounding neighborhoods, ghettoes, and clubs that house its supporting players, Mark Blatte’s Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed is shaded by skin of varying color and thickness. A broad cross-section of races shows up, an extreme mix of attitudes and sizes, with and without connections, talent, ambition, or moral compasses. There are hierarchies of respect, hills and mountains of greed. There’s lust, pride, people climbing over each other, positioning themselves, stomping all those who would get in their way.

Stomping? Killing.

As a whodunit, Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed has its share of cops, detectives, killers and wannabes, thugs and criminals, onlookers and bystanders. Good guys with dark sides, bad guys with hearts of gold. Blatte, a Grammy–winning songwriter and Wittgenstein scholar, wields language like a knife, and the corpses and philosophy abound. He blasts the genre into new territory with his prose rhythm and sense of style, understanding at a meta-level how to approach the cacophony and demonstrate scholarly knowledge in subtle ways.

“Black Sallie Blue Eyes was one of New York’s most decorated cops. The name on his Italian birth certificate and his American passport was Salvatore Fortunato Messina…. Sal was built tight, wiry, and had this pitbull aggressiveness about him. He worked out, ran marathons—New York, Boston, San Francisco—and he played b-ball. From three-point range he was killer, and unlike many small guys, he wasn’t afraid to take it to the hoop even when it meant he’d get bounced by the big guys underneath…. He also had the gift, or as some guys called it, ‘he could smell the gun,’ which, simply put, meant he would know what you were gonna do before you did it.”

And then there’s Pashko, the Kosovar immigrant:

“‘Now if you growed up where we did, where all kinds of devious, derelict, atrocious shit is going down, you ain’t ever gonna say Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall. That’s ridiculous. The first thing you gonna say is Humpty Dumpty was pushed. Right? And the next thing you gonna say is let’s find out who had didded him and get that low-life motherfucker for real, bro. You feel me?’”

Mark Blatte

These words are heard by Pashko’s cousin, Vookoo, as he stares at Pashko’s corpse. “Someone’s gonna pay, old-world style,” he promises his cousin. “Bet yo. I’m a see to it.” But who’s gonna pay? Blatte conjures up a nasty cast of victims and suspects, treating all with respect even as he skewers their accents and big-lug ignorance.

“Spahiu Congoli—the name on the passport, a.k.a. Vooko, his street name—came to the Bronx happy to be alive from war-torn, piss poor Kosovo, exactly two years after the Serbs started their rape/kill, rape/maim, kill/kill ‘ethnic cleansing’ of his people… He loved watching the fantasy of bad guys and mayhem on TV, and he had a lot of fun wasting thugs, punks, and assassins on his PlayStation 3. The non-stop screen action reminded him of home, only the shit that went on back there was for real.”

Turns out, New York is every bit as real as Kosovo. The search for the murderer leads far and wide and into the heart of hip-hop society—you start to feel like an insider, as if the bouncers have let you past the nightclub’s velvet rope, while everyone else is left waiting outside.

“Scholar’s cousin [Biz] was a playa and producer-writer for the owner of the all-time biggest record label in hip-hop, Sunn Volt. And Biz, well, what could they say? They had just seen his ass on BET. The boy was lookin’ good. It was slick, the way he’d bigged up his latest joint. He was the pride of the hood, no doubt about it.”

Sunn Volt, a.k.a. “The Buddha,” works out of an oak-paneled office with framed quotations on the wall, on or about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, surrounded by eclectic photos of Miles Davis, Einstein, Colin Powell, and others. The quotations are hung there to remind Sunn of “just how limited a communication tool words can be.” When Black Sallie Blue Eyes comes seeking information to help him solve his murder cases, Sunn tells him his clients are sometimes unable to distinguish their image from reality: “Look, I deal in dreams, but with my artists, by and large, what makes them successful is their ability to separate playing the thug for an audience and being one in real life…. Unfortunately, some people believe the hype. When that happens, you have such incidents as I’m talking about.”

These philosophical quandaries—the real self versus the performance, the inability of language to describe the world—add a cerebral element to Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, but without slowing down the thrill-ride. Blatte’s plot is thick with twists and turns, and the broad spectrum of his characters keeps things interesting. By the end of the novel, readers have experienced what feels like the whole spectrum of human behavior crawling the boroughs and islands of New York. He takes the edgy pleasures of the traditional street novel—guns, complex sexy women, lost souls, true talents—and injects the whole experience with high-voltage energy. A dissonant medley of natives, elitists, and immigrants comes to life in Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, their dangerous flaws and wild humanity intact.

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Reading and Teaching Proust Was a Neuroscientist

I have always wanted to teach a semester of freshman English using a single text, moving students via rich allusions out beyond it for further reading according to their individual interests. Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer is a collection of essays linking contemporary findings in neuroscience with visionary knowledge dreamed up by writers and artists a hundred years ago. Concepts like Walt Whitman’s poetic “body electric” and Virginia Woolf’s psychological “stream of consciousness” are proven to have physical origins in our brains and bodies.

Last fall, I created a whole course around the book at California College of the Arts and it worked great! Students found the essays difficult in just the way you would hope: They grumbled, but in final evaluations had to admit they had learned a lot. As one student put it, “I’m kind of a big fan of this class… I’d be tempted to kill myself if I were handed yet another book of fiction and told to write about it.”

Proust Was a Neuroscientist is brilliant in the way it makes connections across the formerly rigid boundary between art and science. CCA is a school of art, architecture, design, and writing, so Lehrer’s essay on Cezanne called “The Process of Sight” was directly pertinent. Another student felt that the book “introduced interesting concepts of science that were unexpected yet relevant to the art context.” Lehrer is amazingly able to instruct the reader in the anatomy of the brain while offering insight into how we are able to read and interpret literature, art, photography, and music.

“The Source of Music” talks about T. S. Eliot and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and led to discussions of what Lehrer calls “the birth of dissonance.” We read excerpts from Eliot’s The Waste Land, watched the section of the Disney classic Fantasia that uses “Rite of Spring” as the soundtrack. Students then produced audio essays set to “apocalyptic” contemporary music.

This all took place in the midst of our national election, before the results were in, when there was a feeling we might be headed for the end of the world. Listening to musical renditions of our collective fear felt cathartic; writing narrations that placed the music in context of Lehrer’s dissonance theories provided liberating historical perspective. “Nothing is sacred. Nature is noise. Music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear.”

But who’s in charge? Lehrer asks, “Is life just a fancy machine? Are we nothing but chemicals and instincts adrift in an indifferent universe?” Free will versus fate is a favorite debate for the college classroom and readily feeds late-night dorm room philosophy. Lehrer analyzes natural selection versus intelligent design and dissects the biology of freedom via George Eliot and Middlemarch, along the way providing a useful introduction to the work of Kant and Darwin. The book is ingenious in the way it references so many thinkers from the realms of philosophy, art, literature, psychology, and sociology, including neuroscientist Fernando Nottebohm who blessedly posits that the mind can remake itself anew even as we age. (This notion has been popularized recently in the PBS series hosted by Peter Coyote on the brain and “plasticity.”)

Art students tend to be active, sensual, tactile people, so they appreciated unusual assignments like the audio essay and a visual essay that included thorough-yet-concise captions on “the cliché of representation” and “art’s pseudo-scientific fidelity to reality,” inspired by Lehrer’s Cezanne piece. We contemplated the limits of light, read Baudelaire’s 1859 critique “On Photography,” and bent our minds around Gestalt theory and optical illusions. Thus, the engaged student reports, “What I have learned in your course has bled into my other courses (and personal life).”

The title piece on Proust lent itself nicely to creative writing and personal essays, with the trick being to access forgotten memories. Proust’s famous madeleine caused an involuntary memory, triggered by the sense of taste and smell, “the most nostalgic sense.” Yes, we ate madeleines in class, and read excerpts from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past – Lehrer explains the reasons for the various translations of the title). Apparently, we do not only reach wisdom via the intellect. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile, Proust wrote. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.

Given that CCA students are in the business of creating material objects designed to elicit sensations beyond intellect (i.e. art), Proust’s ideas here have clear relevance. Students are taught all their young lives to be reasoned and logical people; they arrive at art school and have to be retrained as emotional and imaginative creators, a task sometimes best achieved by unreasonable, illogical methods.

Are we crazy? “Science is not the only path to knowledge,” according to the blurb of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. “When it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.” Lehrer asks us to read Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. According to Lehrer, Stein’s major literary discovery was that, no matter how hard she tried to strip language of meaning, the brain’s “desperate neuronal search for patterns” trumped her. We studied Tender Buttons, initially incomprehensible like so much of Stein’s writing. First, just let it wash over you and see how that feels. Then apply your brain and analyze meanings of individual words plus words in relation with one another; in the midst of nonsense, meaning arises. Students were assigned to write “nonsense essays,” something they laughed at, thinking it would be easy, only to learn how difficult it is to turn off the brain’s basic impulse to make meaning.

About Oakland, CA, where our campus is located, Stein famously said, “There is no there there.” Lehrer shows that neuroscience agrees: “The head holds a raucous parliament of cells that endlessly debate what sensations and feelings should become conscious. These neurons are distributed all across the brain, and their firing unfolds over time. This means that the mind is not a place, it is a process.”

Lehrer sees Virginia Woolf as having offered an alternative to the hardnosed scientific materialism of her time. “Woolf’s art searched for whatever held us together. What she found was the self, the ‘essential thing,’” Lehrer writes. She “wanted to expose our ineffability, to show us that we are ‘like a butterfly’s wing… clamped together with bolts of iron.’” And who hasn’t felt that way, as finals loom, and family calls, and we face our future not knowing what it will hold? “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention. We bind together our sensory parts by experiencing them from a particular point of view.”

With what magnificent vitality the atoms of my attention disperse, Woolf wrote, and create a richer, a stronger, a more complicated world in which I am called upon to act my part.

We are all called upon to act our parts. I am an English professor. With the help of Jonah Lehrer’s clearly written and comprehensive book, I did what I am compelled to do: teach students how to read, write, and think for themselves, whoever they may be.

**

See Also: Anti-War Poetry and the Oxymoron of Liberal Fathers

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