Then, like any reasonable person, I quickly Google-stalked him. So quickly, in fact, that I slightly misspelled his name—searching for Michael Lucas instead of Michael Lukas—and got, for my first few hits, the president of a gay adult-film company whom New York Magazine had crowned as the “Porn King of New York.”

Well, I thought, either I was in for an interesting couple of hours or my ride-giver had a name double. As it turned out, both conjectures were correct: I had an enjoyable couple of hours getting to know Michael Lukas, and, a couple of years later, when Michael sold his first book, he decided to publish it under his full name, Michael David Lukas, in part to avoid accidental conflation with his quasi-doppelgänger. The novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, is enchanting: an alternate history in which a brilliant girl, Eleonora, gains the confidence of the Ottoman sultan and changes the empire.

Recently, Michael and I talked, this time about alcohol-fueled Rotary meetings in Tunisia, the depiction of consciousness, the problems of promoting cultural understanding between the United States and the Arab world, a magical trunk, the Porn King’s take on Blue Steel, Oulipian exercises, and what it’s like to start a novel over six times.

***

The Rumpus: You started writing The Oracle of Stamboul while living in Tunisia for a year. What do you make of the current political situation there?

Michael David Lukas: It’s pretty remarkable and, I think, cause for some hope in a region that’s had its share of difficult times. It’s especially amazing given that the political culture in Tunisia—as opposed to Egypt or Lebanon—has historically been pretty repressed. I remember walking down the street with a Tunisian friend and pointing out a poster of the then-president, Ben Ali, that I hadn’t seen before. (The streets were plastered with posters of him, but they were usually one of two or three official portraits, and this one was a more casual shot.) My friend didn’t respond and so I repeated myself, thinking that he didn’t hear or that my Arabic was wrong. After I repeated myself he grabbed me by the collar and hissed in my ear: “We don’t talk about that in public.”

Rumpus: You’ve said that, while in Tunisia, you retreated into a trunk of books you’d brought with you, and that this trunk in turn helped inspire your book. A trunk of books sounds pretty magical. Can you tell me more about these books—what books you’d brought, and why?

Lukas: I still have that trunk. It’s a beat-up brown footlocker—the kind of thing you might bring with you to summer camp, though I bought it originally to store my baseball card collection. When I was packing for Tunisia, I needed something to haul all the books I wanted to bring with me, and this trunk seemed like the perfect vehicle. It had a sort of “grand tour” romance and it was invested with all this sentimental value from the baseball cards. Choosing the books was pretty easy. I wanted to fill in the holes that came from attending two schools (Brown University and Berkeley High School) that don’t particularly value the canon, and to start exploring those old European men who all my teachers were suggesting I read. So, on the one hand I had a bunch of Library of America volumes (Steinbeck, Twain, O’Connor, Baldwin, Nabokov, Emerson) and on the other hand I had Calvino, Saramago, and Grass. While I love the Americans I read in Tunisia, it was the Europeans who really impacted my writing.

Rumpus: What was it about the Europeans in particular that got to you?

Lukas: That mixture of history and magic, the idea that one person or a single act can alter the course of history. Whether it’s the proofreader who alters history in Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum, or Saleem in Midnight’s Children, that idea really got under my skin. If I wanted to analyze my attraction to the idea, I might say that I was feeling frustrated in my attempts to “promote cultural understanding between the US and the Arab World,” which is officially what I was doing in Tunisia, and the idea of being able to magically change the course of history became really appealing to me. Plus, there is something about the voice of those writers—Grass, Calvino, Saramago—a certain wise detachment, that is almost entirely absent from American literature. The only writer I can think of with a similar voice is William Maxwell.

Rumpus: That sounds like an outsized mission, promoting cultural understanding between the US and the Arab world. How were you supposed to do that? Did you give talks, or was it something more vague—you would go out to bars and act decorously, in a non-American, non-drunken way?

Lukas: Especially at the beginning of the Iraq War! The larger idea was that I was going to learn Arabic then spend my life translating Arabic literature into English, which I still hope one day to do. But, while I was in Tunisia, I realized two things: 1) there are thousands of Arabic-speakers who also know English fluently and might be better qualified than me to translate Arabic literature into English, and 2) Arabic is really, really hard. I’d studied Arabic for three years before even going to Tunisia and it was only at the end of my year there that I started feeling comfortable reading the newspaper. Besides learning Arabic, my promotion of cultural understanding mainly involved going to Tunisian Rotary club meetings, which are really different than American Rotary club meetings. In America, Rotary club meetings usually involve a hotel ballroom and the pledge of allegiance; in Tunisia they more often involve crazily overpriced whiskey and lots of smoking. So, actually, drinking became a large part of my mission on the ground.

Rumpus: So you did have to be decorous while drinking. I was living abroad during the first year of the Iraq war, too, and I remember feeling a little resentful at how often I was called to speak on behalf of America. I kept explaining that I’d voted for the other guy, and, yes, I was angry, too. Did you come across any particular hostility that year because you were an American?

Lukas: People definitely told me what they thought about Bush and America’s foreign policy, sometimes in a pretty aggressive way. But they were always careful to say that they understood the difference between the people and the government. The only times I got really uncomfortable was when people would start with the conspiracy theories (which were often pretty anti-Semitic). The worst moment, in that respect, actually came drinking shots of vodka with a Czech flight attendant who was friends with my roommate. He didn’t know I am Jewish and, after a few shots, started going off in a really vile way.

Rumpus: You know, there’s something wonderful about the fact that, while feeling powerless in Tunisia and reading a lot, you first started to develop your novel’s main character, Eleonora, who’s set to change the course of history in part by—reading a lot. That was something that moved me about The Oracle of Stamboul, Eleonora’s enormous, literal faith in the power of books. It’s how she comes to the decision to stow away, how she figures out how to answer the sultan. Why do you think Eleonora immediately puts so much of her trust in what books can tell her?

Lukas: I always thought of Eleonora as a character who sees the world almost entirely through the lens of literature, like Don Quixote or Madame Bovary, except that Eleonora’s trust in literature is a strength, not a flaw. But I never realized that she might have some connection to my own reading when I was in Tunisia. I like that.

Rumpus: The novel that means most to Eleonora is one you made up. Why’d you make her favorite book one that doesn’t exist outside of The Oracle of Stamboul?

Lukas: There’s something really magical about a piece of art that exists only within a piece of art. Works like that have a magic hologram quality to them, which is fun in a Borgesian/Escherian kind of way. It’s also about as close as a work of art can come to perfection, existing only as a reflection of something else.

Rumpus: Then a work still only exists in its ideal state, by not existing yet.

Lukas: Ideal and yet it lives outside the author’s mind. In a way it’s kind of like that movie Inception.

Rumpus: I enjoyed the blog post you wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review, explaining why you were publishing your novel under your full name, including your middle name: “I decided to add the David, in part, because I think it sounds good, because it will help me stand out from the crowd if my name ever gets on the side of a book. The second, and admittedly more important, reason is a certain very well known gay porn producer by the name of Michael Lucas,” the “Porn King of New York.” The Porn King then commented on your post, apologizing for any troubles he’s caused you. What do you think—in a world with an ever-growing population and ever more name doubles, is there going to be less of a chance for one person to stand out, let alone change the course of history?

Lukas: I think it might be harder to stand out on the internet, but the odds of changing the course of history are probably about the same. In that respect, I think Michael Lucas, the Porn King of New York, has a pretty major leg up on me. Not to mention his abs, and a Blue Steel look that would make Ben Stiller blush.

Rumpus: Oh, now I need to go Google him again. As for changing history, there are some obvious parallels between the declining Ottoman Empire and the U.S. now: two overburdened, overstretched empires that are running low on funds. Were you incorporating these parallels from the start, or did they come upon you as wrote?

Lukas: I wanted to write about the end of empire, so in that respect I was incorporating it from the start. But I didn’t realize how many similarities there are until I finished the book. It’s pretty frightening to think about how much of our debt is owned by foreign governments. But at the end of the day, I could live with the United States being the France or England of the 21st century. What’s really scary to think about is the brutal ethnic violence and nationalist jingoism at the very end of the Ottoman Empire, after The Oracle of Stamboul takes place. It’s frighteningly easy to imagine a situation like that happening here.

Rumpus: That’s part of what alarms me about Sarah Palin—I know a lot of people still think she’s an improbable fringe figure and that she could never be president. But people initially thought Nazis were improbable. You’ve lived in Turkey before, right? Or were you visiting?

Lukas: I lived in Ankara for a year, teaching English to future English teachers.

Rumpus: Do you speak Turkish?

Lukas: My restaurant Turkish is really good. I can order just about anything and give my compliments to the chef in a number of different ways, but that is about the extent of my Turkish knowledge.

Rumpus: That’s the most important kind. Especially the compliments.

Lukas: When a meal was really amazing you tell the chef, “Health to your hands.”

Rumpus: Health to your hands. Writers could say that to one another. You went through six drafts and five years of your novel, starting over each time, which sounds both painful and heroic. What was that like?

Lukas: It was pretty brutal at times, and there were definitely some dark nights of the writer’s soul. But in the end I think it was the best process for me. Being able to start from scratch actually saved me a lot of time, or at least that’s what I tell myself, and the book is much better for it I think. Hopefully, the next book will involve fewer drafts.

Rumpus: Can we talk about despair, and those dark nights? Were there low points during draft four, draft five, when you thought, dear God, let me not be crazy? If so, what did you to combat the am-I-crazies?

Lukas: I definitely succumbed to the am-I-crazies more than once. In the middle of draft four, I put the whole writing thing on the back burner to pursue a career in socially responsible business. But then after about a month of that I realized I was really unhappy and forced myself to get up at 5:30 AM to write before work. By the time the am-I-crazies really set in, though, I was too deep to not finish. And I told myself that I would rather be someone who finished a novel and couldn’t sell it then someone who gave up. I was lucky to spend the last year of the writing process in Wisconsin, far away from anyone who knew how long I had been at it. My girlfriend knew, but she had her own dark nights of the grad student’s soul to contend with.

Rumpus: What’s it like debuting a novel in these uncertain times in publishing? (Though, sometimes, I feel as though, as far back as I can remember, I was hearing that publishing is in the middle of terribly uncertain times.)

Lukas: Although the times are uncertain, I feel confident that there will be a place for writers, and for physical books, and for independent bookstores, in the land of the future. And while I think it’s horrible that we only have (what is it?) two stand-alone newspaper book sections in this big country, we still have a very vibrant literary culture. From certain angles, the internet can look like an enormous book club.

Rumpus: The other day, I was reading a Harper’s review by Jonathan Dee in which he confessed to a prejudice against historical novels—not that he’s against reading them, but that he has trouble understanding why writers write them. Per Dee, “a novel is a document of consciousness, and since consciousness today is not precisely what it was when Woolf wrote, or Flaubert or Cervantes, the search for a form that reflects faithfully what it means to be alive in one’s own time…must constantly refresh its own terms.” I don’t fully agree with him, but I find myself wondering about the challenges of writing not only a historical novel, but a historical novel about a country in which you’ve lived a year, that existed and wrote in a language you for the most part don’t speak, from the point of view of an 8-year-old girl prodigy—it feels like a sort of Oulipian exercise in terms of the number of constraints you’d set for yourself. Did these challenges feel like challenges; or, conversely, were they freeing?

Lukas: I read that review and it really put me off. I think I just totally disagree with the idea that a novel is “a document of consciousness.” That’s one thing a novel can be, but to say that it’s the only thing is pretty narrow-minded in my book. I would counter that a novel is an exercise in imagination, and that distance—whether it be temporal, geographic, or whatever—from your main character helps free the imagination (in an Oulipian kind of way). What’s more, I would think it would be really stifling to try to write a novel that documents our current zeitgeist. And even a really successful novel of that nature, like The Privileges or Freedom, are inherently historical, just by virtue of the time it takes to write and publish them.

Rumpus: I believed in Eleonora in all her autodidact, stowaway, hoopoe-blessed, sultan-counseling ways. Do you think that, in your writing, you’ll keep pulling from worlds outside of your immediate experiences in terms of place and/or time?

Lukas: The next book, which I started working on a few months ago, is about the Jews of Cairo through the millennium. It’s kind of like Isaac Bashives Singer meets Dan Brown meets André Aciman and they all go smoke hooka together at Naguib Mahfouz’s favorite cafe. This new book does have a contemporary plot line, though (in addition to an 11th century one and a 19th century one), so I will have to brush up on my zeitgeist a little.

**

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in VQR, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review.

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***

That the rise of the so-called realistic novel coincided with the Age of Reason may be no accident. When, in 1740, Samuel Richardson published Pamela, which some consider to be the first novel, he explained that he wanted to “introduce a new species of writing” that would omit the “improbable and marvelous.” Down with the dragons and griffins, was his message, and up with virtuous young ladies.

For the most part, realism has held sway ever since, making it easy to forget that a devotion to verisimilitude is still a relatively modern development in the history of the story. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Homer to Milton, in myths, fables, and religious narratives, monsters and gods are everywhere, the supernatural is real, and the natural world terrifies. If it’s true that storytelling has its origins with those forebears who crouched around fires and told tales to try to make sense of the dark, wild world, then maybe realism’s reign is tied to the fact that we have lived in a more predictable world than did our predecessors. Even when it’s dark outside, we don’t believe in monsters anymore.

Or do we? After the misrule of our last president, after Kyoto, after Copenhagen, after our national barbarisms and colossal, global mistakes, in a warming and divided world, it appears that we are living, once again, on an Earth that might well extinguish us. Is it a coincidence that nonhuman animals and fantastical monsters have been making a comeback in the fiction of imaginative younger writers? In short-story collections published in the last five years by writers as varied as Rebecca Curtis and Karen Russell, Hannah Tinti and Michael Czyzniejewski—and, most recently, Laura van den Berg and Lydia Peelle—unlikely creatures abound. A man brings home an elephant (Czyzniejewski). A dangerous wolf-man is at the door (Curtis). A museum’s stuffed black bear comes to life (Tinti). A family needs to choose which of its members it will feed to a monster (Curtis again). A young girl wrestles alligators (Russell).

In the work of these otherwise heterogeneous writers, there are some shared tendencies: the monsters and animals intrude upon more or less realistic fictional worlds. Underlying conflicts between human characters are dramatized via creaturely metaphors. (The man with the elephant has a wife who fails to notice the pachyderm’s presence in the bedroom; the museum bear haunts a young woman whose artist father is dying; the alligator-wrestler has a troubled older sister; et cetera.) People speak less to one another; when they do, they say less of what they mean to say. There is little confrontation and less blame. Shying away from fighting with their human antagonists, they tussle instead with wolf-men and hungry monsters. Much like the monster under the anxious child’s bed, the creatures in these stories tend to be menacing. (Monsters, of course, are no more than exaggerated versions of more familiar animals.)

Laura van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing are the most prominent recent manifestations of the impulse—let us call it the monster impulse—toward the nonhuman and non-confrontational. Full of imagined creatures, diverse beasts, and fearful people, these debut collections help demonstrate the fascinations, and the possible traps, of using other species to articulate all-too-human troubles.

***

In van den Berg’s excellent collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, personal disaster is omnipresent and inescapable. A husband vanishes. A lover is soon to die of cancer. A mother is losing her mind. People die by drowning, by fire, by snakebite. Much of the evil that befalls the characters is worse than banal: it is circumstantial. Often, there is no one specific to blame. When there is someone to whom fault might be assigned—an uncommunicative husband, a neglectful mother—the character escapes confrontation and instead obsesses over more global concerns: the husband frets about riots in Paris, the mother devotes herself to environmental problems and forces instructional videos on her daughter’s friends. They excuse themselves from blame—and, to some degree, are excused—by their larger worries. Dear John: It’s not you, it’s global warming.

In clumsier hands, the absence of clear antagonists could cause these stories to float into bland, solipsistic, would-be Beckettian territory. Van den Berg, however, is a disciplined and inventive writer, and has directed the attention of her characters, victims and perpetrators alike, away from their navels and toward a parade of strange, fantastical creatures. There are mythical monsters: Bigfoot; the Loch Ness Monster; a dread Congolese monster called the mokele-mbembe; and the mishegenabeg, a monster suspected of lurking in Lake Michigan. There are unusual and exotic animals: the mapinguary, a giant primate; the Amazonian coral snake; and lemurs in Madagascar. It is as though, left behind with their loss and no one to blame, the survivors seek out the monstrous and the strange to find something that might measure up to—might even make some sense of—their outsized sorrows.

In “The Rain Season,” for example, a woman named Catherine has come as a missionary to the Congo while grieving the loss of her husband, who died in a house fire. Catherine befriends a young boy whose parents are dying, possibly from AIDS, and as the country veers toward war and everyone who can flee does, Catherine lingers. She gives the boy food and makes note of villagers’ reports of the mokele-mbembe, a sauropod thought to have “inky eyes, skin the color of rust, a body thick with muscle and scales.” It is said to live near the village in Lake Tele, which it leaves only to abduct villagers and frighten Americans. To keep the monster at bay, villagers repetitively draw its image in the dirt and keep watch for its enormous footprints. They cannot control the ravages of illness or ward off the impending civil war, but they can at least try to keep the mokele-mbembe in the lake. Catherine hardly believes in God—the Lord is her dead husband’s deity, and she is not sure why she came to the Congo at all—but now she feels that she belongs here. Her husband died in a fire because of malfunctioning electrical wiring; how much better, really, to be able to assign fault to a monster than to circuitry.

“Up High in the Air” features another woman grieving a loss while thinking of monsters—this time, in the form of the mishegenabeg, an aquatic monster thought to live in Lake Michigan. The woman, Diane, is mourning the death of her father, who drowned in a boating accident. Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder that she’s preoccupied by water: “All bodies of water look the same to me now,” she says. “Places to get lost in.” What is more surprising is that her obsession has spilled over to her husband, a scientist who recently left his job and is now working for a small stipend as an “expeditions manager” for the Mishegenabeg Discovery Group. He whiles his time away on the absurd search for the monster, which is reported to be either “at least fifty feet long and the color of moss” or “like an overturned boat floating in the water.” Diane, a university professor, is understandably frustrated with her husband’s sudden devotion to his not-quite-job, yet the characters of this story are Houdinis of difficult conversation, skilled in the art of slipping past their interlocutors. Her evasions, and those of her husband, attain new heights when her husband discovers that she has been sleeping with one of her undergrads. She says she can apologize in a number of different languages; he says he’s not interested in the languages she speaks. And then they listen to an audio recording of what he says could be the mishegenabeg.

***

If van den Berg’s collection focuses on what seem to be the victims, the accomplished stories in Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing center on the perpetrators. Peelle’s protagonists are destructive, irresponsible, reckless—people who are themselves the monsters they most fear. Again and again, characters forget and betray themselves, their bodies, their lives, a wife, a husband, an employer, a beloved. The most pitiable victims of her collection, however, are wordless—not because they shun confrontation but because they are not human. The real victims are the animals and plants, the very oxygen, so misfortunate as to have to share the earth with Peelle’s two-legged wastrels.

In one story, a man who finds work at a goat farm and robs his hardworking boss finds himself, months later, sorrowing over having left the farm—not because he regrets the theft but because he forgot entirely about the crippled kid goat he was hand-raising, in secret. It must have died without him, he realizes. In another story, a disappointed and aging divorcé lives in a town in which there is a rash of sightings of a phantom panther, “a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees.” That the man, Jack, is by profession a taxidermist provides a neat contrast to the improbability of the panther’s existence so close to the same humans who have made the land inhospitable to its kind.

The implications of man’s negligence are made more explicit in the last and perhaps the strongest story, “Shadow of the Weary Land,” in which three men—the narrator, the Musician, and a Revelations-quoting quack visionary who claims to channel the ghost of Jesse James—search for buried treasure. The Tennessee terrain they canvass is cheap farming land ridged by three-hundred-year-old trees. Developers, of course, are on their way.

Once again, the narrator’s own destructiveness parallels the imminent destruction of the natural world: He exists in the aftermath of a stroke brought on by years of excessive drug use. “My mind, before I ruined it,” he says, “was a beautiful thing. As an old man I can say this without vanity or pride. The brilliance was like the light of late day over Joe Guy’s back field, but now the light is gone.” Later, he says that if he had the wherewithal he would buy back the threatened land and “save it for the coyote, the heron, the possum, the bobcat, the kestrel, the broad-winged hawk.” A pleasant enough sentiment, to be sure, but of course it’s made impossible by his utter lack of wherewithal and by the damage he has wrought. As another of Peelle’s haunted protagonists recognizes, the world may well be ending, and they—we—have done it to ourselves:

And a few more decades down the road, he thinks, at the rate we’re screwing it all up, what will it even matter? The water poisoned, the air ruined, too many damn people and more every day—what is it that we all want to hang around for, anyway?

***

What is startling and right about the best of Peelle’s and van den Berg’s stories is that even at their most fantastical and animal-centric, these stories address a central reality of our real, human world—there are so many malefactors at large that there’s no one in particular to blame. The panic that pervades these stories arises from a shared consciousness that there is too much cause for fear and worry. Who, exactly, is to be held responsible for the deteriorating environment? What, precisely, causes terrorism? Most importantly, what ought we to do? Enter the bugbears and scapegoats, enter a reliance on metaphor to say what can’t be confidently said. If there is a monster under the child’s bed, it can be avoided or destroyed. If there is a mokele-mbembe in the Congo, it can be tracked. If a kid goat is in danger, it can be succored; if it is neglected and died, it can be mourned. Focusing on the mokele-mbembe keeps Catherine from wallowing in self-pity or self-blame. The panther sightings add interest to the taxidermist’s otherwise flat, regretted life. Freed from self-regard, these characters can turn their attention to the more dynamic world around them.

And yet, as I read these stories, I began to long for more interactions between perpetrators and victims of the same species. (It’s worth noting that van den Berg’s monsters appear only in the characters’ imaginations.) After all, fiction’s particular province may lie in the exquisite possibility of inhabiting others’ minds—of trying to understand that which is not the self. By eschewing confrontations with the only kind of animal that can understand and talk back, by refusing to engage with human wrongdoing, by escaping painful self-examination, van den Berg’s and Peelle’s characters are, in some ways, giving up this fight.

“The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena,” said Wallace Stevens. As substitutes for Satan, the inventive van den Berg and Peelle offer the mokele-mbembe, Bigfoot, phantom panthers, a mishegenabeg, and kid goats. Even while it gives rise to such delights, the monster impulse is a risky one, as so much evasion between characters can make for frustrating fiction. That these writers so often succeed in their storytelling is an indication of their considerable talent.

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And so, after a minute of crack sleuthing, I’ve discovered an address to which one can write to ask Northwestern University to reconsider their decision to get rid of TriQuarterly’s editorial board (after the jump).

Because, of course, the upsetting part of the announced changes is that the university has decided the magazine no longer needs its editors and TriQuarterly can function just as well as an “‘open source’ student-run journal.” (The university is moving the print journal online, too, but that’s comparatively a minor point.) Editors–it should be needless to say, but it seems it isn’t–matter, as does demonstrated expertise. For the most part, editors labor for little glory and less pay because they love discovering, curating, and, well, editing new literature–and the good ones are invaluable. Poet C. Dale Young writes here about the wisdom that TriQuarterly’s longstanding editor Susan Hahn brought to bear on his first manuscript of poems; the New Yorker’s Book Bench makes the point that “reducing overhead in materials and distribution by publishing online is one thing; letting go of the editors who guided the literary vision of a serious journal over the course of decades signals a more ominous commitment to cost-efficiency at the expense of institutional and intellectual values.”

Ye lovers of letters: write a short email! Normally, I would add: and subscribe to TriQuarterly to help support the magazine, but since its future is, for now, nil–subscribe somewhere, if you can. Maybe to the New England Review, whose future also is threatened, or the Virginia Quarterly Review, where editor Ted Genoways is a vocal advocate of the embattled college-backed review, or the Kenyon Review, or AGNI, or Epoch, or the Southern Review, or the Missouri Review.

More details:

The how: the president of Northwestern is Morton Shapiro, and he can be reached at nu-president@northwestern.edu.

The why: in short, TriQuarterly is an excellent and groundbreaking literary magazine, founded in 1958, that was the first to discover writers ranging from Amy Hempel (by publishing her heartstopping and oft-anthologized story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried”) to, more recently, Aleksander Hemon. As per an email sent out by TriQuarterly’s associate editor, Ian Morris, the decision was made by the university–and handed down to the review’s editors–only hours before a press release went out.

Additional reading: Ted Genoways, the editor of VQR, writes eloquently here and here about the enduring value of university-backed literary magazines and presses, and why universities and readers should care about these undersung creatures.

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“High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life” by Brian Christian, an essay in the latest issue of AGNI, made me giddy with the thrill of following the writer’s logical freefalls from chaos to probability to predictability to the problem with text autofill technology to why it is that small talk might make you want to kill yourself.

This particular essay is available only on paper, so you should go buy a copy of the consistently excellent AGNI at your nearest bookstore. In the meantime, you can read other essays by Christian online here and here.

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A troublemaking child, a deadpan narrative: this brings to mind, of course, the echt American original who was Mark Twain. It is a common experience for the reader who loves Twain both to marvel and sorrow at his singularity, for who else can provide the joys he gave? To have found by the lights of the bay a story so wonderfully reminiscent of Twain—and yet original, too—makes this homesick transplant feel that much more at home.

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Sometimes I separate the books I intend, one day, to read, into two groups: the Bookcase of Desire, and the Bookcase of Guilt. Desire is made up of anticipated pleasures, the books I haven’t yet read only because time is cruel and limited: Bernard Malamud’s novels, for example, and Jude the Obscure, and Alice Munro’s most recent collection. Guilt, on the other hand, is crammed with the books I know I ought to read. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, for example. Gibbon and Boethius. Then there’s book after book of poetry–predominantly poetry written after, say, Elizabeth Bishop. I want to read more contemporary poetry, I ought to read more contemporary poetry, and yet, which is partly why poet-critic Adam Kirsch’s book, The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, comes as a revelation and a delight. Its essays discuss poets from Geoffrey Hill to Czeslaw Milosz so lucidly, so thoughtfully, that it’s as much of a joy to be guided into a greater understanding of a poet as to find myself arguing with a critical interpretation. Itself a profound pleasure to read, The Modern Element does more than illuminate: it transfers books from the Bookcase of Guilt to the Bookcase of Desire.

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***

It is said that Virginia Woolf once played a parlor game of sorts, and it went like this: all the partygoers wrote down what they considered to be the best novel ever written and tossed their slips of paper into a hat. The slips were pulled out; the notations read; from slip to slip, unanimously, Middlemarch won. Part of the reason for her admiration for Middlemarch, Woolf later wrote, was that she considered it to be “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

This essay is not about Middlemarch. This essay is about Mortals, by Norman Rush, published not in 1874 but in 2003. Mortals, too, is a novel for grown-ups, and it, too, is magnificent. But there the easy congruities end, because so far it’s an underground kind of book, criminally undersung. Yes, Rush received a National Book Award for his earlier and only other novel, Mating. And, yes, he has his following, and its devotion can be cultish.  More than one friendship of mine has been solidified by the mere mention of Norman Rush—someone will toss off his name, maybe in passing, maybe contrasting him to some lesser but more loudly praised hero of literature, and I’ll exclaim, delighted, Oh, Norman Rush!, and we’ll both startle and take a closer look at each other, suddenly recognizing the kinship of that small but passionate band of brothers, that lucky few: Rush admirers.

But if I have learned anything from years of recommending this book to friends, family members, acquaintances, fellow writers, dinner party companions, deli clerks, taxi drivers, mailmen, telemarketers, stray passersby, and a few puzzled but forbearing cockatoos, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing.

So, specifics. First, the story. Mortals is about Ray Finch, a white American CIA agent living in Botswana in the post-Berlin Wall years. Almost 50, Ray is a singular spook: a gun-hater and Milton scholar, he’s also the kind of bibliophile who can calm himself by touching his books and who, under duress, relies on lines of poetry much as a devout Christian might turn to scripture. His expertise in literature provides his cover: by day, he’s a teacher of English literature at a school in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital.

But what, one might ask, is Ray doing in a job not usually thought of as a refuge for bookish hoplophobes? His wife, Iris, a liberal and an idealist, wants to know the answer to that question, and thence springs the crisis that quickens the first half of Mortals. Iris believes in Ray and in his potential for greatness, and believes, furthermore, that his other, better destiny lies outside the agency. She wants him out of his job. And her wants matter, because, to Ray, Iris is of the highest importance. It’s difficult to think of a more convincing depiction of two adults who seem—through Ray’s eyes, at least—to be crazy about each other. Early in the novel, Ray thinks to himself, funnily, “Being obsessed with someone you had been married to for seventeen years was probably a first.” Conjugal sex abounds; conversation, too. They’re clever; they’re carnal; they make each other laugh. Logophiles both, they love wordplay. They revel in their intellects, both their own and each other’s; to be alive and so well-coupled, it seems, is very heaven. But unease is rattling their Eden: despite their compatibility, Iris is dissatisfied, and Ray knows it. The novel begins in disquiet, with this exquisitely backtracking first sentence: “At least whatever was wrong was recent, Ray kept telling himself, he realized.”

Their marriage is made more precarious with the advent of Davis Morel, a black holistic doctor and devoted atheist. Davis has come from Boston to Botswana determined to spread the gospel of humanist enlightenment, and is all ideals and high purposes; the man doesn’t even lie. Even before Iris lets her husband know she’s started seeing Davis for therapy, Ray distrusts him, and tries to investigate him via the agency; after the revelation, his distrust becomes obsession. He suspects Iris of being attracted to the good doctor. Spy that he is, he watches her, he analyzes her, and he even studies her doodles. He holds his breath when she talks, so as not to miss a single inflection of her words; irritated, she asks him to stop.

At this unstable juncture, Ray is ordered into the field to find an arsonist who, along with a band of followers, is at large somewhere in the Kalahari. And so it is that this adultery novel turns political thriller, so full of suspense and violence—terrorizing! killing! interrogation!—that, one day, some behemoth of a movie studio surely will try to bastardize the novel. Meanwhile, amid the pandemonium, Ray finds cause to examine his life, his métier, and his marriage, and to start pursuing that most American of aims, redemption.

Mortals is so rich, so full of marvels, that one is tempted to create a Borgesian map to the book, an appreciation as large as the novel itself. But I’ll stop here with the narrative, because as pleasurable as is his storytelling, it’s Rush’s genius with language that raises him from the excellent to the extraordinary. He writes so beautifully. And I don’t mean “beautifully” in the way of so many, lesser novelists—by slapping in pretty metaphors, or indulging in facile lyricisms—oh, no, no. Instead, and to a greater extent than almost any writer I can think of, Rush is interested in the rhythms of thought, in how we hear and speak to ourselves. Take, for example, the following excerpt. Ray has come upon a fire set by he’s not sure whom; a man is dead on the ground, his brains dashed out; alarmingly, Ray thinks he sees someone moving in the distance, and then this:

“I am ashamed,” he announced. He didn’t know what he meant but he could figure it out because he was intelligent. All he needed was a rest. In fact, as he got to his feet again, he figured out why he’d said what he’d said. It was private. What he was ashamed of was that ever since he had come down into this burning place the bottom half of his mind had been converted into a prayer rug. He had been playing a constant Muzak of appeals to God, thanks to God for this and that. He visualized his brain sitting in a thick syrup like cough medicine. He began coughing just then and asked God to help him stop. He stopped. He thanked God. He couldn’t not, it seemed.

What’s startling here is how closely this passage tracks Ray’s mind. There’s the way Ray feels the general emotion, shame, before he can identify what its causes might be. “He could figure it out because he was intelligent”—not, the reader will notice, “because he had faith in his intelligence” or “because he could count on his brain.” Rush has pushed aside the scrim of authorial remove; this is exactly the way someone like Ray, so used to relying on his intellect, would phrase his self-assurances. Then there are the perfect, abashed metaphors of the prayer rug and the Muzak. Ray, a secularist who tries to be intellectually rigorous with himself, isn’t one to enjoy his foxhole-atheist pleas. Then there’s the comparison to cough medicine that segues into his involuntary coughing, either because he has already started to feel the urge to cough, or because the image provokes the latent need: whichever it is, again, this is an apt and unforced metaphor, made true to how Ray, in that moment, would think. Finally, there is the wonderful swing from reason to fear and back again, appealing to God, then being ashamed of himself for appealing to God, and so on.

This, I would argue, is one of the keenest pleasures of the novel and is singular to the form. Film, music, painting, sculpture, day-to-day life: more than all of these, intoxicatingly, the novel can give us intimate access to the workings of the mind of someone who is not ourselves. And Rush, more than almost any living writer, generously grants that ingress.

Ray, so wholly revealed to his readers, works throughout the novel toward greater self-knowledge. With increased knowledge comes judgment, and with judgment comes the possibility of correction. Here, perhaps, is why I count Mortals as a novel for grown-ups: it is deeply concerned with moral questions. Not by moralizing—dear god, no—but instead in its understanding of the ways in which our intellects and intentions can fail us—can, in fact, lead us madly astray. So, for example, this following passage early in the novel is a fascinating study in self-justification:

He wasn’t a thug. In fact he took pride in the certainty that he had never directly injured anyone in all his years in intelligence, not once, directly. And of course he had chosen to work in the borderlands of the struggle. He saw himself as a provider of truths that others would make use of, for good or ill, the morality of what they did with them being their problem and not his.

More backtracking: in that second sentence, those three words “not once, directly” suggest underlying depths of doubt. And, in the same sentence, the careful use of the word “certainty” insinuates the exact opposite: “certainty” is much less certain than, say, the word “fact” or “reality.” It’s worth mentioning that Ray went into the CIA at least partly because of his own ideals, in a time before Vietnam, before Guatemala, when Communism loomed as the one enemy and the United States could seem a last great hope. In both his personal and professional lives, Ray meant well—means well—but of what use is that? At 48, is he living a good life, and what is a good life? As an American and as a person with power, his actions have consequences; that Ray is made responsible for these consequences makes Mortals, rollickingly comic though it can be, serious and necessary.

Are there faults to the novel? Well, there is perhaps too much prose dedicated to Iris’s perfections: her breasts, her face, her wit. Also, I know of people who have found the narration, so stylistically unique, to become wearying somewhere in the course of the 700-plus pages. A chapter in which Davis lectures on the shortcomings of Christian doctrine could, to some, be tiresome. But there are flaws to all great and ambitious novels, loose baggy monsters that they are. The critic James Wood, a champion of Rush, rightly has said that big books such as Mortals “flick away their own failings and weaknesses, make insects of them.”

A French mathematician, after watching a performance of Racine’s Iphigénie, shrugged and asked, “Qu’est-ce que cela prouve?” What does that prove? Rush’s novel proves, what, that we are alone, that we try to be less alone, that, as irresponsible as we are, we are responsible, that we can’t help ourselves, that we have to try to help ourselves: like life, but better, it urgently proves nothing and everything, and must, dear readers, dear writers, dear cockatoos, be read.

**

Purchase Mortals from Powell’s Books

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