Didion once wrote about having seriously considered building a shopping mall empire to support herself as a writer, and in Where I Was From she is still thinking about the complicated, alienating place where she grew up – about why it has so often left her feeling troubled or chagrined. “For most of my life California felt rich to me,” she admits, “that was the point of it, that was the promise.” Where I Was From is a tricky blend of memoir, literary criticism, and investigative reporting, and it is fascinating.

Returning to an eighth-grade graduation speech and her first novel, Run, River, the author owns up to her “false” nostalgia about the place, and subjects her novel to a thorough critical reassessment. To give readers some context and to satisfy her own curiosity, she dusts off some (very dusty) classics, among them Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A California Story, an obscure William Faulkner short called “Golden Land,” and the private writings of Josiah Royce, the philosopher and California-native who not-so-famously concluded that “there is no philosophy in California.” In these, too, she finds a lot of myth, a lot of confusion.

In some of the best essays, Didion looks at California’s prison system, prompted to write after seeing her state no longer “rich enough to adequately fund its education system,” the central valley towns of her youth “so impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortunes was by getting themselves a state prison.” If the prisons are part of the largest such system in the western hemisphere, they’re so isolated you might never know it. Who has heard of Blythe? Susanville? Chowchilla? The prison guards’ lobby, Didion reports, is also one of the most powerful political organizations in the state, and she makes an eerie parallel between the prisons and the Southern Pacific railroad, the subject of Norris’s Octopus.

Which reminds me. I read submissions for a literary journal, mostly short stories, but recently I opened something a prisoner had sent. It was from Soledad, if I remember right, and what I found myself reading was not so much literary fiction as a cry for help. The town of Soledad has two prisons. In Spanish, soledad means solitude.

Didion is a writer especially attuned to ironies, but the more you read this book, the more it hits you that there are just too many. And it’s not just the prisons. The state has sold out to various corporate interests, perpetuating a belief in self-reliance while relying on federal dollars to sustain itself. The gold rush mentality persists. This is a place where, if you’re trying to find an apartment in San Francisco, you might, as I did, run into an insane Craigslist ad that reads: “Two of your housemates are tech entrepreneurs (both built companies from zero or near zero through exit) with extensive backgrounds in B2B, high-volume consumer and some social gaming/enterprise social.” (Just saying).

She also writes movingly about the death of her mother, an immense loss that seems to go hand in hand with her questions about what makes us who we are. What does it mean to be from somewhere, really, if as she suggests, “‘me’ is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.”

When critics talk about Didion they tend to talk about her coldness, or as a blurb from Harper’s in my paperback copy puts it, her “ice-pick/laser-beam prose.” But what makes Where I Was From worth reading is something else, not just iciness and intelligence. This is a book that makes you want to find everyone you know and shake them and tell them “hey, you should really read this now” – because there is a lot packed into these gems of essays, and the stakes are as high as ever.

The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there. “What on earth does it mean to ‘fly at’ somebody?” David Foster Wallace once asked, in an exasperated footnote in his essay on Joseph Frank’s literary biography of the Russian novelist.

The weirdness in Dostoevsky (Wallace also called Notes from Underground “one weird little book”) belongs to the larger strain of absurdity in Russian letters. In Gogol’s famous short story, a collegiate assessor’s nose roams St. Petersburg disguised as a state councilor. That would be odd enough, but Gogol keeps interrupting himself to address the reader. “This all dissolved into mist, and we don’t know what happened next,” he says, dropping one narrative thread to pick up another. “The Nose” ends with Gogol intruding again to explain that, upon reflection, his story is too implausible to be true. Then he takes that back, too. If you add one thing, he points out, and then another, and then a third… “Say what you like,” he concludes, “but such incidents really do happen in the world.” Clearly, we aren’t supposed to know what to think.

In Russian literature there are ten Gogols for every Checkhov. In Oblomov, the main character spends the first third of the novel in bed. The Master and Margarita is about the Devil’s surprise visit to Moscow and the fantastical havoc that ensues. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers recently translated a collection of stories by the famed Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, whose characters are always crossing into and back from the shadow world. In one story, a woman shares a seaside mansion with Poseidon’s widow and her son, who spends his days scavenging the ocean floor.

So it’s perfect that the stories in The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s collection of essays about her graduate studies in Russian literature, are so quirky and funny and strange. The content of Batuman’s book couldn’t be better married to its style. The Possessed is literary criticism as smart comedy writing; it is Gogol meets Susan Orlean in the Stanford Ph.D. program.

Like all great comic figures, Batuman has the narrative advantage of never knowing exactly what she’s doing. In the introduction we learn that she was never cut out for fiction writing. Literary criticism will be her calling. Then, in the essays themselves, we learn that she doesn’t really have a knack for that either.

Or does she? The Possessed turns on a sly commentary about whether one can truly know a literary text. Just as you can never really know another person, Batuman seems to say, because a person’s essence remains elusive (“Where exactly is the person?” she keeps asking), so too you can never truly know a literary text, no matter how intensely you study it or how much you learn about its author. Batuman travels the globe in a series of comically absurd literary investigations, all the while speaking between the lines to the ghosts of her Russian subjects, asking what it will finally take to understand them.

My favorite essay is “Who Killed Tolstoy?”, in which Batuman cadges a trip to an international conference at the great Russian novelist’s Moscow estate to investigate whether he was poisoned. Aeroflot loses Batuman’s luggage, making hers perhaps the only forensic literary investigation conducted entirely in sweatpants.

Was Tolstoy really murdered? Batuman makes a good case, but of course we cannot know. Whether we are mulling the rudiments of our daily existence, the things that make us who we are, or a great writer’s inscrutable end, the world will always be too absurd for us to understand. The genius of so many Russian writers was that they expressed this truth so well. And yet we have no choice but to go on reading them. “If I could start over today,” Batuman writes, “I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I think that’s where we’re going to find them.”

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The plot trajectory of the book: kind of expected, to tell the truth, but Oscar Wao, the main character, is the loneliest sci-fi nerd in the Dominican Republic, and I really love him. He’s my baby brother, though I’m white, and grew up in Pittsburgh and my family circulated in middle-class Episcopalian circles and Oscar grew up Caribbean and Catholic.

Oscar Wao is my literary baby brother as much as Fran Leibowitz is my wisecracking big sister; I’m inclined toward him. His “nerdliness” (a big hat tip to Junot Diaz for the creation of new slang) is my nerdliness. I can’t run away from the fact that in junior high I begged my mother for months to get me a DIY paper mache dragon mobile, and a unicorn notebook with hearts and stars shooting from it’s horn. It’s comforting that no matter what a geek I was in the 80s, in my Keds, clutching my unicorn notebook, it’s not even one iota of Oscar’s lameitude. Oscar was the kid in your class so below the social radar that you didn’t even notice.

Yet Oscar burns bright. He’s smart, he’s witty, and he worships at the shrine of Woman. In contrast, the narrator, Oscar’s Rutgers roommate and his sister’s sometime boyfriend is a Dominican playboy who loves shagging. He’s got game. But even he, dog that he is, whines to have any of Oscar’s talents and passion. The laugh-out-loud passages in the book are treatises on Latin men pondering quien es el gallo mas gallo, the bigger Caribbean hombre, with puffed out chest and high-shine shoes. But Oscar’s manliness is of another sort.

Maybe it’s that big sister thing. You just want to squeeze the overweight hulk of Oscar, tell him it’s going to be okay, as you would a savant toddler. You want the book to end with him triumphant, head of a company, a Dominican Bill Gates, or the author of a best-selling novel about the atrocities of Trujillo (which are creepily witty and well catalogued in the book’s many footnotes). Instead he ends up dead, beaten to death in a sugar cane field.  The collateral damage: Junot Diaz’s completely new fresh language, the spot-on urban Spanglish sci-fi of New Jersey also dies.

What a cliché, but  like Oscar, that  wonderful language, was too good to live. When the plot takes us back to the Old Country, ye olde magical realism of Diaz’s own Caribbean heritage rises up in the narration like an overgrown tropical plant. The same thing happened to Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated. Foer had a Russian-English hack translator who was a thigh slapper, but then Big Things Happened (cue WWII) and the whole thing went Chagall. It was disappointing, but I never loved Foer’s narrator, and I love Oscar.  I’m heartbroken that he had to flare out, because of fuku, the “curse of the Caribbean.”

In my imagination Oscar lives. He’s older now, svelte, a jewel in the North Jersey Dominican scene. He’s a sci-fi writer, and a father, playing D&D with his nerdly sons and nerdette unicorn-clutching daughters and he often quotes his namesake, Oscar Wilde: “one’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.”

Related posts:

1. Joel Arquillos: The Last Book I Loved, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2. How to Make an Oscar Wao
3. David Baldizon: The Last Book I Loved, Outer Dark

On the Lower Frequencies spans a wide-ranging grip of topics, including organizing and playing in illegal punk shows in the Mission, marching in the city-shutting-down protest against the war, and a hilarious and terrifying account of the donut shop that was the “epicenter of crime” of San Francisco, which readers might recognize from Lyle’s reading on NPR. The author is friends with many political organizers and activists, and writes about his and their experiences working on mayoral campaigns, needle exchanges, and homeless outreach programs.  He is also plugged into the underground art scene, notably interviewing bay area artist Zara Thustra (Google: Sara Thustra) multiple times in the book, revealing some rad perspectives on the intersections of art and personal/political change.

One particularly interesting aspect of the book is the frontiers to which Lyle and his friends push the well-known punk/DIY ideal of repurposing unused objects and public space.  San Francisco residents see street art every day, like the recent “Gold Miner Store” pieces on Market Street and the massive city-sanctioned murals in the Tenderloin.  What many may not wonder about, however, is the extension of these art statements to the reclaiming of actual unused public buildings.  The possible center of Lyle’s narrative, which is organized loosely since it is excerpted from multiple sources and contains interviews and letters, is the story of the 949 Market squat, wherein Lyle and his crew discover a massive abandoned building, build it into a sustainable punk paradise, and then use it to organize huge shows, host free dinners, and provide living spaces for friends.  I found this story fascinating, not just for the specifics of how they found and occupied such a huge space for so long (see book for details) but also because it forces us as readers to consider what “vacant space” means in the city, especially when we walk past huge, boarded up buildings every day on Market Street while dozens of people struggle to stay warm outside the padlocked doors.

The more personal sections of the book are written very poetically, from summers in the city with old friends and new bands, to Lyle’s first nights in San Francisco spent exploring every street on foot, to listening to a Dead Moon record alone, far from home, desperately worried about a friend.  Even without considering the cultural and political essays, On the Lower Frequencies captures the underground/punk moment in an elegant, beautiful and extremely informative way that I think would be of interest to anyone within or without any particular group or scene.

A final cool aspect of this book is that, despite many of the businesses mentioned having closed down and many of the events chronicled taking place a few years ago, the people and bands and artists and activists working in Lyle’s stories are for the most part still working right now.  You can stop by Clarion Alley in the Mission to check out a Zara Thustra mural, you can read new articles by Lyle (latest one on Art Basel, Miami) in the SF Bay Guardian, and you can stroll down to Needles and Pens on 16^th street and pick up the latest issue of Scam.  The DIY-culture energy is still very much alive in San Francisco today, and reading On the Lower Frequencies is a great way to learn about both the history of the phenomenon and the current outlets for political activism and non-consumer creativity.

Related posts:

1. Erick Lyle’s Secret History Of The City
2. Josh Tyree: The Last Book I Loved

Well, that’s a lie. I should say that it’s the great book I dabble in, here and there, in frantic, frenetic moments, moments that invariably make me turn the music up loud and run around the house, wishing there was a reasonable way to tattoo the star of David and moon of Islam on my respective fists. Truth is, the book’s a tome, and unless you’re a scholar of Hebrew Poetry or Moorish Spain, or simply a much better man than I am, you’re unlikely to read this thing from cover to cover. But you should. I picked the book up after hearing Cole read a few years ago at the University of Utah’s guest writers reading series. At the time, I was polishing a novel that featured a heretical translation of the Tehillim (psalms, for those of you who’ve lacked the good fortune of an ultra-orthodox Jewish education). In the course of writing that book – or perhaps this is why I wrote that book – I’d worked on my own translation of the Tehillim. Because Hebrew relies on a system of shoreshes, three-letter roots, for its words, words carry traces of other words (must have made Derrida so damn happy). These traces allow for an infinite and maniacal system of puns and double-entendres. This problem only gets worse when one realizes that whole sentences in the Tehillim are lifted out of Ugarist poems worshipping the gods of sky and water. Honestly, I do think that the Tehillim are a heretical work recuperated by the King James and some real fear of Hebrew poetry, but I digress. Peter Cole had unearthed five centuries of Jewish poetry, written in Spain, in Hebrew, between the end of the tenth century and 1492 (yes, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue). At his reading, he read some of the Hebrew before his translations. It was stunning. His translations were stunning, too, but I did suffer a moment’s disappointment when the book arrived in the mail – turns out my local independent bookstore does not stock this one – and realized that the book only included the English.

That disappointment was short-lived. The translations are excellent, and the introductions to each poet contain the kinds of fantastical biographies that were the stuff of my pre-adolescent daydreams. You know the kind: the ones in which you and an unusually apt tree branch re-imagined as a scimitar, and the space behind your backyard-grapefruit tree, allow you to command wild and bloody battles.

Take, for example, Shmuel HaNagid. Here’s a dude who flees a Berber revolt and ends up young, impoverished, and on his own. He opens a spice shop, and begins working as a scribe. His handwriting is pretty enough to impress the Malagan Vizier, who takes him into his court. From there he has a helter-skelter decade of ascension that leads him to Granada. Another decade goes by and he’s promoted to chief vizier of the Andalusian Caliphate. For those of you less versed in Moorish political positions, the chief vizier sits between the ruler and his subjects. Think of him as prime minister for a king who has actual power. All this from fancy handwriting! But that’s not all. When Shmuel is promoted to chief vizier, he’s also made head of the Spanish Muslim military. And he’s no Donald Rumsfeld behind a desk in the Pentagon plying his pretty letters abstractly to matters of life and death. He rides at the head of the army when it goes into battle for sixteen of the next eighteen years! How about that? A Jewish scholar who leads a Muslim army into battle! Cole writes that when Shmuel died at sixty-three, he’d just returned from another military campaign. Do I wish that there’d been a detailed accounting of those battles replete with hacked off limbs, and dramatic acts of daring-do? Of course. But I don’t need it, because I have Shmuel’s exquisite poetry. I have “Jasmine:”

Look at the jasmine, whose branches are green
as topaz, and its stems and leaves –
while its blossoms are white as bdellium.
With canelian red in its shoot
it looks like a pallid boy who’s shedding
the blood of innocent men with his hand. (45)

Even better, I have a poem in which Shmuel and his brother discuss their outrage at those who head the academies of Talmud study – mind you, this from a man who was not only the head of the Jews in Andalusia – Nagid is his title for that role – but an impressive Talmud scholar in his own right. In the poem he attacks the stuffiness of the old fools reciting their prayers. The poem culminates in the following verses:

And the teacher expounded at length,
preying on every sound they made,
and I sat there enraged at the sight,
and my soul grew sad…
I asked the good teacher after his health,
but he answered as a man of strife –
and he started reciting the hundred blessings
in a course voice, like an army or horde,
and he thanked the Lord
who had made him a man and not a woman.
And I told him: “You flaunt your phallic soul,
but the Lord will prove you hollow.” (48)

Shmuel seems to point at a different mode of practice, a spiritual rightness in action, an advocacy for engaging the material world. The final three lines could be read as Shmuel’s rejection the “good teacher’s” manliness, and thus chauvinistic, but I like to think he’s also making a statement about the emptiness of thanking God for having a cock. I like that in an eleventh century poem.

I recently visited Granada and toured the Alhambra. My first instinct was that Europeans had deeply influenced the Moors, and that the Moors had adopted Christian-Europe’s palace-building style: long, pooled courtyards ringed with orange trees and columned, vaulted walkways, impossibly high-ceilinged rooms with secret crannies in which one might imagine a mad Hamlet sequestering a desperate Ophelia, elaborate gardens, towers, dungeons, garrisons. I was wrong. The Alhambra, it turns out, was the blueprint for the Europe. It was where medieval Europe went to learn science, architecture and culture. I imagine Shmuel at the beginning of this compound’s magnificent development, his nights spent in its tight garrisons cramped amongst his soldiers, his days in the elaborate halls of powers.

But this is but a fraction of the book. Spanish Jews invented the Qabbala. And, like any kooky revolutionary religious movement, Qabbalism wasn’t developed in isolation anymore than was its recent celebrity cult following. Would-be mystical messiahs ran rampant through late-Moorish Spain. Who can blame them? The caliphates were losing strength, and infusions of power from North Africa inevitably brought with them fundamentalist restrictiveness. The Christians’ intents were never in question. Dependent upon a repressive failing state for sanctuary from an encroaching, genocidal army, Spain’s Jews quite reasonably hoped for an end-of-days way out. Fortunately, despair and mysticism are potent poetry-inducers.

Take the Qabbalist Yosef Giqatilla, who, granted, lived quite some time before the Reconquista’s success.  He found his way to prison, where he continued to write. This is from his prison poems. Goths eat your hearts out:

1. As Love Lives

As love lives, fly – O birds – to lovers
with greetings from suffering men, held in the ground,
and tell the world, I beg you, they’re hungry and thirsty,
though bread of their tears and blood of their hearts abound.
They’re cast like unwanted births, deep in dungeons,
where lice and fleas and mosquitoes feast on their flesh,
and tiny creatures that have not names yet jostle
against one another, like lovers in frenzies of lust.
Flies buzz at the bees, the rodents gnaw,
their teeth attacking body and soul exposed –
and jailers and soldiers harry the prisoners, as ordered.
and no one brings them a morsel, not even the crows. (263)

His other prison poems range from threats based in God’s avenging power to despair at God’s abandonment.

Of course this is but a tiny sampling from a 540-page book. I love this book because it makes me want to live in Moorish Spain. It makes me wish – I think justifiably – that the Reconquista had failed. When I read it, I want to be Shmuel HaNagid

Related posts:

1. The Last Book/Poem I Loved: “The Changing Light at Sandover” by James Merrill
2. The Last Poem I Loved: “Made Flesh” by Craig Arnold
3. A Girl Asleep in a Dream of Herself in a Dream

When I look at it now, I feel as if I was there when it was shot. I’m not sure if I was the camera, the photographer or the desperate, naked girl- doomed and luminous and ashamed of the soles of her feet. Whomever I was, I was so close to the action that I could smell the dirty fifty dollar bill that the blonde was paid for the job. And now the calendar itself, formerly one of my most treasured objects, seems like an odd piece of taxidermy.

Blonde is Oates’ fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe. Written in five parts and traveling a somewhat circuitous route from Marilyn’s awful childhood to her worse death, the gorgeous and grisly prose is comprised of voices channeled from a host of spirits, some famous, some not. Oates assembles her Marilyn collage from a constantly shifting collection of perspectives and moments. The most entrancing voice in the book is Marilyn’s, breathless and heartbreaking and almost audible. However, the perspective always shifts back to an omniscient narrator, who has already seen the film through to the end and beyond. The presence of this narrator reminds us, lest we become too hopeful, that Marilyn’s end was there from her beginning.

Not only is Blonde a success in its searing and constant poetry (over 700 pages worth), it’s also a triumph of humanism and feminism, in spite of its ghoulish finale. It is a profound feminist statement to take a woman who was owned by all and cared for by no one, who was the ultimate sex object to a public that both adored her and tore her to pieces, and give voice to her soul.

The Carne family are arty and bohemian, but solidly upper class—the narrator Deirdre is a budding journalist, her sister Katrine a beginning actress, and their mother has obviously been left most comfortably off by her deceased husband. Along with the youngest daughter, Sheil, a little girl still with her governess, all the Carnes are at constant play with their imaginations. Fantasy narrative is the central organizing principle of the Carnes’ homelife—these women are fangrrrls before fangrrrls were invented. At table, they spin—or rather, act out—new installments of their collaborative running serial, with a dramatis personae made up of toys and dolls they’ve owned and regard as real people, characters from books, and, most intriguingly, celebrities from the stage and public life whose careers they follow and whom they speak about as if they were intimates. In producing an ongoing play in which they all willfully suppress the line between reality and fantasy, the family are essentially practicing fan-fiction 50 years before that genre really got started.

The family governesses—they have quite a bit of governess turn-over in the eccentric and intimidating Carne family—are at first amused, then bemused, then alarmed and censorious, when they realize that the actors, writers, and government officials who are spoken of with such familiarity by all the Carnes, as if they were always in and out of the house, are in fact strangers to the family. At least, until Deirdre attends a charity bazaar where she meets the wife of Justice Toddington, an elderly high court judge who is the family’s chief imaginary pet (they collect pictures of him cut from the newspapers and like to imagine him in elaborate pajamas, yawning “like tiny jam tarts”). The Carnes and Toddingtons become friends, a friendship which is first threatened, and then gloriously reinvented, when the elderly couple get their first glimpse into the parallel made-up world in which they play a part.

It’s not just this situation that appeals to me so deeply in Ferguson’s 1931 novel, which I’ve read 5 or 6 times since I first got a hold of it in a Virago Modern Classics reprint 15 years ago. The weird story is carried along by the witty, peppery, penetrating and sometimes downright ruthless narrative voice of Deirdre Carne, who is a sharp observer of her London world, and stern parser of its unbreachable class boundaries. She’s particularly unsympathetic to the interloping governesses (though no one in the family ever questions that the little sister needs a governess—being looked after solely by her mother and sisters is not an option in their time and class). But she’s also unbending when a successful music hall star who has long been a (real life) family friend and mentor to her sister’s acting career turns into Katrine’s real life suitor—because it’s one thing to adore Freddie Pipson who, though a Cockney and a professional comedian, is one of nature’s gentlemen, and quite another to marry into his family. That, she advises Katrine, is, no matter how much she might love and respect him, is impossible.

I have to admit that I was so enchanted and persuaded by Dierdre’s voice that it wasn’t until I discussed the novel with an English friend and then reread it again, that I noticed what a complete and often nasty snob Dierdre is. I was too instantly bonded with her to be critical, because of pronouncements likes this, from page 1 of the novel:

A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, ‘Do you like reading?’ which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread—absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever. And then Katrine blinked at the woman and said, ‘Yes, a little.’

This is the sort of novel that can inspire that kind of total involvement and sympathy.

So what does all this have to do with the Brontës? Apart from the parallels between the three imaginative Carne sisters and the three Brontë sisters, there’s the governess connection, and this is where the book surprises, because you’d expect the Carnes, with their effulgent fantasy life, to have a little more sympathy for these vulnerable women who come to join their household. But the Carnes’ exuberant ways are no match for the expectations of Miss Martin, the new governess. It takes a visitation from the ghosts of the Brontës —or are they really ghosts?—to make a decisive change for both the out-of-depth governess, and the Carnes as well.

This unusual novel is a portrait of a family seen from the inside (as Miss Martin reflects, “Families were very awful things: showed one face to each other and another to the stranger within their gates.”), and of a certain London social milieu in the time of the Bright Young Things. But most of all for me, it’s a foray into the overwhelming role fantasy and narrative can take in the lives of intelligent women that felt at once so familiar to me, and so astonishing to find going on in fiction. Rachel Ferguson’s novel presents as no other book has, a vivid and specific portrayal of the role of collaborative fantasy in inner—and outer—life.

Related posts:

1. Leni Zumas: The Last Book I Loved, Inner China
2. Nine: The Last Book I Loved, A Complicated Kindness
3. Jared Pappas-Kelley: The Last Book I Loved, Branwell

The novel begins with Rufus, a bright and kind black drummer from the South, who has forsaken his musical promise and sanity in the name of loving a white woman. Not being able to believe she could sincerely love a black man, he has physically beaten her into insanity. While she rots in an asylum, his ignominy has left him homeless and isolated. He makes one last appearance at the home of his best friend, Vivaldo, a white-irish writer who has spent the last years of their friendship trying in desperation to prove to Rufus how very deserving of love he is. Vivaldo showers him with affection and brings him out to a bar to see their friends Richard and Cass, a bohemian couple nearing middle age. Rufus has a few drinks, smiles softly, and disappears again, this time to hurl himself off a bridge.

The rest of the novel is something of an apostrophe to Rufus. Eric, an old friend and ex lover of Rufus’, returns from a few years in Paris to see how all of his friends have changed. Vivaldo takes up a love affair with Rufus’ sister, Ida, who is as dubious as her brother to believe a white person’s feelings for her. As Ida pursues a vocal career, Vivaldo struggles with a novel. Cass and Richard, who have served as mentors, seem to have become painful symbols of what happens when Art grows old. Richard finally publishes a novel: it is a crime mystery of great commercial success and acclaim which seems to Vivaldo and even Cass a concession that Richard will never reach brilliance.

As Vivaldo watches Cass and Richard’s once idealized marriage fall apart, and he and Ida’s relationship grows into a competition of artistic success, he bemoans the feeling of possibility that seemed, once, to be everywhere; as much as he misses Rufus, he wonders whether his friend made the right choice getting out. Eric and Cass begin sleeping together and develop a relationship which is unique in its honesty. Neither feign that it might be love, though they perhaps wish it could be.

The beauty in Another Country is that it permits a reader to at once lament and celebrate the ways in which we use each other to further our own ideas of self. Baldwin’s relationship with humanity is stunning in its ability to forgive and understand. Though his characters err and ache, though they hurt each other needlessly, the author’s presentation of them is hopeful. By the novel’s close it is clear that Rufus’ death has been a gift of sorts: his mourning friends have been compelled to try and love harder, sing louder and longer, and create art that will outlast them.

A week later a package arrives at my mother’s house, where I am staying for a month to sort some things out. The package is addressed in my professor’s handwriting, and inside is Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. The book is yellow, with a silver and blue graphic on the paperback cover, drooping in my hand as I hold it, standing in the middle of my mother’s hallway. I don’t notice it until later, but across the top it reads “Advanced Reading Copy – Not for Sale.” When I do notice, it makes me think of the book as singular, and although I know there are many other copies out there, mine becomes somehow specialized, advanced, like the cover says.

I already know that I’m going to like The Ticking Is the Bomb. I was introduced to Flynn (or rather, I introduced myself to him) in my second year of college via his poetry in Some Ether. His work is dark, and for some depressing, and The Ticking Is the Bomb is no exception. It is a memoir about torture, among other things, and Flynn’s traveling to Istanbul to hear testimonies from the men in the Abu Ghraib photos. Although I’m reading three other books at the time, I start The Ticking Is the Bomb the night I get it. Very quickly it becomes my train book, a coveted place in the hierarchy of reading material. I carry it everywhere, and at one point, spill guacamole along the side, which clashes horribly with the yellow and blue cover and crackles the pages when they open.

To say that a writer provides us with strong imagery is, I admit, a sweeping generalization in terms of literary critique. But when I speak of Flynn, I mean something more than the declaration that he simply writes with strong imagery. Towards the beginning of The Ticking Is the Bomb, Flynn describes his personal experience, in New York, on the morning of September 11th:

A few minutes after [the towers fell] I stood with another crowd of strangers inside an appliance store on Broadway and watched the first tower fall on a bank of televisions. I could have stood on the sidewalk outside the store and seen it fall, but I thought there might be some words coming form the televisions that would make it all make sense.

It is not simply the concept of television vs. real life, or real experience vs. experience via technology, that makes the passage so striking, but also the visual manifestation of these concepts we are left with. The thought of tens, hundreds of strangers crowded around department store windows, gazing into the blue light of the televisions, the real-life falling towers ignored behind them, dusting in the background – this is what makes me pause, rest the pages open on my lap as I look around the train. It is the weight that pauses me, and this weight is what becomes most striking about The Ticking Is the Bomb. In the above passage, it is not simply that Flynn brings together 9/11, the media surrounding 9/11, and his own personal experience, but that he writes in such a way to leave a tangible visual to hold all of these concepts at once, a visual that I must examine, that demands a minute of pause.

My old professor writes me again to tell me about a reading Flynn is giving in San Francisco. That evening, my mother tells me about the same reading; as it turns out, it’s being put on by a monastery we used to visit, and we decide to go together. It seems almost too parallel, the different aspects of my life meeting all at once, and as I listen to Flynn talk about the book, I find that the commonalities and intersections that lead to my being there are mirrored in Flynn’s own writing. Because it is not only the smaller moments of The Ticking Is the Bomb that bring together strange, seemingly disparate concepts, but on a larger scale, the book as whole does this as well.

I sit next to monks and Zen students I met years ago, and I sit next to my mother, and I hear Flynn say that the book is about torture, but also about many other things. He says that good writing, at it’s heart, it a map of the subconscious, how we display the more complicated intersections that exist in our minds. And it’s true – The Ticking Is the Bomb is about much more than torture. Flynn writes about his mother, his father, his past and current lovers, the imminent birth of his child into a world where such events as the Abu Ghraib photos are possible.

This is what makes the book worth it, for me. A personal account, only about torture (even with writing as strong as Flynn’s), seems flat when I imagine it, a single, clear track. The Ticking Is the Bomb is anything but singular or flat, and as I listen to Flynn read, I think of the similarities between how his book has come into my life, and how the events within it’s pages are pieced together. I begin to realize what about his choices, his writing, makes a book about torture interesting. The parts of Flynn’s unconscious, written and published onto the pages of The Ticking Is the Bomb, are what give his exploration of torture meaning, a context. The contrast of events even as they interlock, this is what adds depth and substance, much like the monks sitting next me, much like my mother sitting on the other side, much like the professor up in Oregon and his thought to send me the book in the first place. Everything becomes layered, one thing on top of the next, and as in my own experience, The Ticking Is the Bomb allows us to see the threads between the layers, the delicate strings holding it all together.

A passage I read over and over again to my friends, as I talk to them about the book, is about child psychology, and the development of the idea of time. In the section entitled “The Broken Bowl,” Flynn explains:

Until the age of four it is just as likely the broken cup comes before the whole cup, that the floor is just another table, that milk can be poured into the broken cup, that the broken cup can be put back on the table and will be whole again. I tell myself to try to remember this, for the day my as-yet-unborn daughter pours her milk into a broken bowl.

Once again, the image we are left with is pointed, succinct, and simultaneously holds large and disparate concepts within it: the development of consciousness, how we relate ourselves to the world, a child, innocence, and that child’s experience of brokenness, of destruction. I read this passage sitting on the train, the wet smell of the carpet floating around me and the other commuters, rain dragged in by thousands of footsteps over the course of the day. I am given pause once again, and I think of my professor’s daughter, a toddler, the one I sit for on occasion. A picture immediately forms: Her dark, thin hair held by elastic on the very top of her head, her face smiling, as it usually is, waiting for the next remarkable thing to happen, as most things, for her, are new and remarkable. At her feet is an orange bowl broken into pieces, and she holds a carton of milk in both hands, the weight of it barely supported by her small muscles, trying again and again to fill the pieces at her feet.

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I bought a different book today he said, and pulled Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur out of his bag. The cover seemed interesting enough, a single eye looking through a circular peephole and the author’s name in strong block letters, so I agreed to the trade.

The novel starts innocently enough; a Professor of French Literature narrates an ordinary day in his life. He wakes up, gives us a tour of the apartment he shares with his wife, infirm father, and father’s nurse, then works, eats lunch, submits to sex, takes a walk, enjoys dinner, watches a movie, and back to the apartment. As a voyeur, he gives strong visual descriptions, and perhaps because of that he is able to break the MFA’s cardinal rule, Don’t Start Your Novel With The Character Waking Up In The Morning, and gets away with it. I was angry at first: no one should be able to do that! It’s supposed to be boring! Start us in the middle of the action! But, of course, the anger came from jealously; he succeeds where so many do not.

A retelling of the Oedipus Myth, there is competition between the father and the son, obsession with nuclear destruction, a Mallarmé poem begging to be acted out, and an electric eroticism between all characters. The voyeur intimately explores the themes, after all, as the father says, “No one has every held themselves back without regretting it later.” The main reason why I love this book is that Moravia holds nothing back.

The greatest success of the novel is that delving into the highly sexual details of the character’s lives, it’s impossible not to feel like a voyeur. The language is so strong and detailed that though reading, you can see the exhibitionists taunting you, daring you, to look away.

I read the first chapter in bed, then most of the book on public transportation, and the ending in bed again. During the juiciest bits, I wondered if the strangers on the subway and the bus were reading over my shoulder and what they must think of me, reading such explicit scenes in public. Reading over the shoulder could be a type of voyeurism, invading the private stealthily, “no one, except a voyeur, could chance to see it without being aware that he is guilty of an indiscretion.”

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