Middle C
by William Gass
Knopf, March 2013
416 pages / $28.95  Buy from Amazon

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles review of Books, William Gass cited a fellow titan of high postmodernism when asked about the role of obsession in his fiction. “[William] Gaddis maintained that the writer needed an obsession; he or she would then worry about it like a cat with a rag. The obsession may be hard to spot and it took me some time to discover mine: the stupidity of mankind, its misuse of reason.”

If the common thread of Gass’s fiction has ever been too translucent or opaque to put your finger on, with that sentence he gave us the decoder key to his entire oeuvre.

And where do human beings misuse their reason more than in regard their own self-image? This is the question that Gass chooses to plumb in Middle C, just the third full-length novel of his otherwise prolific career.

Middle C, in the makings for a decade and a half, comes along at a time when neuroscience is probing more and more deeply (and for some, uncomfortably) at the question of what exactly makes us us. Experimental psychologist and author Bruce Hood opined in his 2012 book, The Self Illusion, “If we are so susceptible to group pressure, subtle priming cues, stereotyping and culturally cuing, then the notion of a true, unyielding ego self cannot be sustained. If it is a self that flinches and bends with tiny changes in circumstances, then it might as well be non-existent.”

And it’s hard to argue. We are funny creatures that, largely through trial and error in testing social boundaries, concoct these permanent-if-illusory entities we like to call selves, ideas which are only further hardened whenever they are challenged by evidence of their amorphousness. Or, as it’s elegantly put with regard to our protagonist, “In Joey’s case, ignorance encouraged certainty.”

But before we ever meet Joey, aka Professor Joseph Skizzen, we are introduced to his father, an Austrian patriarch named Rudi Skizzen who decides to give he and his family new, Jewish identities in order to escape the advancing Nazis and gain asylum in England, where Joseph is born as Yussel Fixel. Of course, all along we have the sneaking suspicion that Rudi is less concerned with his family’s safety or complicity in the atrocities to come, and more ashamed of — or maybe even just bored of — his Austrianness.

In England, with wartime sympathy for the refugee class waning, Rudi reinvents himself once again as janitor and gambling man Raymond Scofield, before his ultimate dematerialization, leaving his family behind and, we’re lead to believe, making off for the New World

The story then picks up in Ulrichstown, Ohio with Joseph, who, right from adolescence, seems uncomfortable as a member of the human race. As he would express as a more articulate — and equally rancorous — adult, “the desires that men displayed, either alone, at social clubs, in political parties, or as communities, leagues, and nations, were fundamentally so measly and uninteresting, and the methods employed to achieve them so borrowed, makeshift, and inadequate, that what was eventually obtained was a shambles, leaving their suitors dissatisfied, angry, and searching for more satisfactory targets.”

Still, in a fit of irony, Joseph discovered something he did want to be: Austrian. And an educated Austrian he would become. Using his imagined Austrian upbringing and a love for “difficult” modern music to boost his air of superiority, Joseph lucks and feigns his way into a position as Professor of Modern Music at the tiny, austere Whittlebauer College, a position for which he is, er, under qualified for, by some measure.

READ MORE >

Flies
by Michael Dickman
Copper Canyon Press, 2011
96 pages / $16  Buy from Copper Canyon Press or Amazon

Upon a first reading of Michael Dickman’s Flies, a reader might be left with impressions abrupt and violent. Perhaps one cannot be blamed for this reaction; the collection oozes strangely enjambed lines and macabre content frequently addressing dark, untimely deaths. Flies, however, does much more than induce the unsettling awe an audience might expect from a horror film, although it does that, too. As a reader takes the time to know and understand the collection — perhaps not so unlike how time is necessary to begin to grieve and to start to heal — we learn that Dickman’s lines are not haphazardly clipped with the sole purpose of creating unexpected suspense and terror, but rather masterfully guide the reader with a humane, almost gentle subtlety.

Flies opens with the poem “Dead Brother Superhero.” The first lines read:

You don’t have to be
afraid (3)

Falling barely short of an end-stop, the first line, “You don’t have to be,” ever so subtly juxtaposes the state of being, via “to be,” with quite the opposite, the dead, as mentioned in the title “Dead Brother Superhero.” This comparative device, in combination with the apotheosis found within the title, results in a grievous, heartfelt magnification of the brother’s deadness.

At other times Dickman’s line breaks summon a subtle duality. In “Emily Dickinson to the Rescue”, the poet writes:

Her legs pumping
her heart
out (22)

Although the speaker states, “Her legs pumping,” perhaps a pumping heart is an even more natural image. Dickman, of course, resists this more traditional description and repetition. He does not write “Her heart pumping.” Instead the piece surprises us with “her heart / out.”  Nevertheless, due to the visual layout of the stanza, it is not too far fetched to envision her heart pumping, as we the readers might even go so far as to imagine the slipping down of the verb “pumping” to substitute for that blaring white space. The audience is left with a delicate duality of sorts. We might visualize the image as written of a “heart / out,” perhaps as if wearing one’s heart on her sleeve, but there is also the quietly suggestive nod toward a heart pumping out as it might while bleeding out during the last moments of life.

The second section of the opening poem closes with the lines:

Any second now
Any second
now (4)

Dickman frequently resists more traditional forms of repetition. The phrase, “Any second now,” is repeated but with the variation of a line break. This technique creates an effect within the poem. The language itself is subtly ambiguous. Breaking the line “Any second / now” permits two reading. Firstly, we are allowed a reading identical to the first phrase without a line break, a straight repetition of what precedes. Additionally, due to the enjambement, a second meaning — that the “now” has actually arrived — is possible. If the poem stated, “Any second now / any second now,” we as readers would be left waiting with the speaker for whatever event he is anxiously anticipating. However, because the repetition is varied by the line break we may interpret the “now” both as not yet having arrived and also as having arrived. Due to the poet’s enjambment and, therefore, the emphasis of the second “now” which closes the section, we as readers can be hopeful but not certain that the awaited time has come.

READ MORE >

Memories of Underdevelopment
by Edmundo Desnoes, translated by Al Schaller
Latin American Literary Review Press, 2004
110 pages / $15.00 buy from LALRP

1. Memorias del subdesarrollo. Or call it Inconsolable Memories, which shows up in the subtitles of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film adaptation, and is itself a wish taken from Hiroshima, Mon Amour, one of the narrator’s favorite movies. J’ai désiré avoir l’inconsolable mémoire.

2. I’ve looked up “underdevelopment” in the dictionary twenty times since seeing the film and reading the book. I’m waiting for the definition to say: a better word for this word is subdesarrollo.

3. The film was shown during Revolution in the Air: The Long Sixties.

4. The longer the 60s, the shorter the 50s and 70s.

5. We’re talking about how to get to Cuba the way our grandparents talked about how to get to the suburbs and their parents wondered how to get west. “I already know the United States, but what will happen here is a mystery to me.”

6. The author photo shows Edmundo Desnoes with full white beard, pipe in mouth, arms over his head in a pose of relaxation, not surrender. “The first responsibility of a writer is to survive.”

7. Reading books after seeing the movie. I made this mistake with The Firm. Even though I find Jeanne Tripplehorn attractive, and love typing out her name, Abby McDeere is shapelier on the page.

8. The novel’s first person antihero, Sergio Malabre, has less poise/élan than a Grisham creation (or Tao Lin) and believes himself, like so many first persons, to be the last man. He’s not a drinker but there’s probably something wrong with his liver. With his wife and family off to America he decides to stay in Cuba, an island he calls a trap, and to live amongst a revolution he calls a tragedy. On a crowded bus he feels like slime. “I am 39 years old and already an old man. I feel stupid. More rotten than mature.” The theme of rottenness in Memories of Underdevelopment is slightly less romantic than DeLillo’s “apple core going sepia” at the close of Underworld. Sergio, our rotten and rotting antihero, is play acting through the period drama of the future. His actual life is something Donald Draper will make a Park Avenue Sad Face about. He does not want what he wants. He does not want the historical anchors his country offers him. In protest, he removes the timestamps from his journal midway through the novel because he believes dates are meaningless. July 26, 1953. April 17, 1961. October 14, 1962. He’s a cultured, good-looking, overripe intellectual educated in New York and Paris (he’s done the 90 miles; no matter how far away it is, it’s always the 90 miles) who wants to know less, who wants to be stupider. #bayofpigs #Octobercrisis #CMC #gameofchicken.

9. As self-aware as Ben Lerner’s cipher in Leaving the Atocha Station, who, following the 2004 Madrid bombings, finds the air alive “less with the excitement of a period than with the excitement of periodization.”

10. Sergio, on a walk through the Hemingway house museum: “Americans have an artificial smell, and the Russians stink.” READ MORE >