Barth’s Early Efforts

John Barth has a well-deserved reputation as one of the more important American writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His 1960 novel The Sot Weed Factor is a brilliant mash up of Fielding, Sterne, and probably a little South American magic realism. I recommend it heartily. It turns out, too, that novel did not spring from his head, fully formed. He tried and tried again before finding his voice – and success.

The two shorter novels that Barth write in the 1950s are The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. Conveniently enough, they can often be found in one thick volume. They are both philosophical; Barth stated that he was interested in exploring nihilism. Both feature a smart and untrustworthy first person narrator. The first is woven around questions of the meaning of life and suicide. The second is about absolutism and abortion. There are moments of satirical humor in both, but the overall weight of ideas and consequences colors the writing. In other words, both are intelligent but somewhat bitter books.

I would wager that perhaps one of the ways that Barth matured as a writer was by abandoning, to a certain degree, both the over the top intelligence and the bitterness. Yes, his literature remains incredibly informed and intellectually interesting. Somehow, though, his need to show it lessened. Along similar lines, his later work is imbued with greater patience and empathy for his characters situation and foibles. He allows the unfolding story to own much of the tragedy and conflict.

Stated differently, when we stop being angry young men we can share.

I wouldn’t rush out to read The Floating Opera or The End of the Road. However, if you find yourself with time and a copy, you could do much worse than to sit down and imagine an ambitious English professor finding the time to create these two extremely interesting works of literature. John Barth is a very good writer.

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David Potash

January 6, 2020 Reviews

Nemirovsky Belongs

There’s something fundamentally appealing – and just a little strange – about the Everyman’s Library. You’ve probably seen their volumes at a used book store. In fact, it’s impossible not to find them at a used book stores. Everyman’s are ubiquitous, with volumes on pretty much every classic work. The idea, thought of by an English publisher, began in 1905 as a way to make money bringing classics to the masses. It has been going strong ever since, with different publishers buying the rights to the series over the years. Whether or not one accepts the concept of a “cannon,” the Everyman’s titles are a good indicator of what mainstream scholars and writers think are important books, fiction and nonfiction.

Whenever I seen an Everyman’s that is new to me, I check it out. They are consistently worth the effort. I may not like the book, but I’ve never read anything weak under title. The streak remains, too, with a volume of four works by Irene Nemirovksy. Nemirovksy was a Ukrainian Jew who moved to France at a young age, became a very successful writer, and was unable to escape the Nazis. She died of typhus at Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 39. The four-work set does not include her writing about life under occupation in World War II, known as the Suite Francaise. Instead, included are David Golder, her first successful novel, The Ball and Snow in Autumn, two short stories, and The Courilof Affair, a political novel. It is a powerful collection.

Nemirovsky’s writing is interesting, reminiscent of Russian literature and also French social commentary. She drives plot quickly, is comfortable examining character’s interior dialogues, and eschews sentimentality and happy endings. She is realistic in the sense that once a piece starts moving, she follows the idea and events through to their end. It’s accessible literature and hard, too. Nemirovsky wrestles with difficult ideas. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand her success. She most definitely wrote literature worthy of serious consideration. She belongs in the Everyman’s series. Nemirovsky’s talent and work also highlight the tragedy of her death.

David Potash

January 2, 2020 Reviews

Barber’s Democratic Passion

Benjamin Barber (1939 – 2017) was an extremely influential scholar and political theorist. Prolific, insightful and super smart, his writing tends to work on two levels. First, he makes erudite and well-grounded arguments. Barber was an emphatic advocate of strong democracy. That theme, his commitment to democratic thinkers such as Rousseau and Jefferson, and his desire to democratic values advance, is consistent.

Simultaneously, Barber’s writing is studded with brilliant observations, asides and comments. He saw things, noted trends and reasons, and they often stop me in my tracks. In fact, I can find these more remarkable than the big picture arguments.

Recently I spent a few hours reading a collection of Barber’s essays, A Passion for Democracy: American Essays. Published in 1998, the book contains works that are even older; the volumes are from a different time. There’s no internet – Barber was a keen student of technology – and many of the references and concerns now seem like distant memories. We don’t worry about the Soviet Union or shopping malls today. Questions of equality and rights are woven throughout. It was a different time.

And yet – and this is what I admire about Barber – there is much to learn from him. He notes the relationship between strong leaders and weak citizens. He forecasts the splintering of viewpoints through new technologies. He notes how the market can censor. Barber repeatedly calls for citizenship, an active and informed people, as the best bulwark of rights, opportunity and justice. These are timely and relevant, still today.

Taken as a whole, I think of the essays in the volume as bright spot lights on particular issues. The light emerges from a hard to locate place – and time – but what it reveals, it does so well and with great clarity. The challenge is that unless one is familiar with what’s under the spotlight, context and relevance may be a problem. I would wager that this volume would have more immediate connection to an older reader, or perhaps someone keen on understanding the 1980s and 1990s when it comes to politics and political issues. Nevertheless, there’s some real wisdom in this.

Barber’s voice is missed. We would be better-informed and wiser if he was alive and writing today.

David Potash

January 1, 2020 Reviews

Curiosity and Community

Good journalism is about telling stories. Peter Lovenheim is a good journalist and he knows how to tell a story.

Lovenheim grew up in Rochester, NY. He traveled, married, began a career, and decided to raise a family back in his home town. He and his wife purchased his childhood house from his parents, giving Lovenheim an unusual perspective on his old neighborhood. As Lovenheim’s marriage was unraveling, a tragedy took place just a few doors away. A physician murdered his physician wife and then turned the gun on himself. The murder-suicide left two orphaned children and the neighborhood in a state of shock. No one in the neighborhood, an upper-middle class enclave with a good reputation, really knew the family.

Most in the neighborhood offered help, gossiped, and moved on with their lives. Lovenheim dug deeper, driven by curiosity, his loss of sense of community, and his personal issues. He wondered if engaged neighbors might have prevented the violence. He wondered, too, who his neighbors were and if they shared his worry about isolation. Were they really all strangers to each another? A year later, Lovenheim developed a plan to learn more about his neighbors and more about his community. The result was a well-received 2010 book, In The Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at at Time.

Lovenheim reached out and found some neighbors who let him sleep in their homes, who shared their day-to-day with him, who brought him to events. He ate breakfasts with his neighbors, rode with the newspaper delivery man, and visited people whenever and where ever he could. He made a few real connections, some true friendships. He interviewed the family of the slain couple. He also was unable to forge much of a relationship many who lived on the street. Lovenheim’s genuine curiosity about his neighbors and their lives makes for interesting reading. He tells a story of a neighborhood and the diversity of its people. What might initially look like a homogeneous upper-middle class community turned out to be something significantly more dynamic and heterogeneous.

Lovenheim also wrote about his life and his search for connection and meaning. Careful not to draw many broad conclusions from his experience, he also knows that his search is part of a bigger issue for many of us. In the Neighborhood is not a rigorous study but it aligns with broader work about contemporary society. Many of us feel isolated. However, if we seek companionship, it is possible to reach out and connect with others. We can build bridges and help each other out. It takes initiative and courage, but it is not impossible. And that when we do, we feel better about ourselves and our communities.

In the Neighborhood is a thought provoking book. Lovenheim certainly has me thinking about my neighbors, and my community, in different ways. No immediate plans for sleepovers, though.

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David Potash

December 19, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews

Rethinking Rufus

A friend and colleague recently loaned me Thomas A. Foster’s Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. The first monograph to tackle the difficult issue of sexual violence against enslaved men in the United States, it is an important study. It is also chilling and horrific, bringing a deeper and different kind of understanding to the evil that was slavery.

Foster is a historian and dean at Howard University, a scholar who works on issues of sexuality, gender and slavery. Foster knows both theory and history, and is as comfortable with primary sources as he is with queer theory. That range and skill set gives Foster the ability to re-examine and re-cast historical accounts through different eyes and with different tools. Perhaps the best example of that is drawn from the book’s very title.

Rose Williams was a former slave who was interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s as part of a slave narrative project. These interviews and other first-hand accounts of slavery are well-known to historians. Williams’ account, which the book includes in its entirety, tells of her forced pregnancy by Rufus, another slave, who she characterizes as a “bully.” Williams had two children by Rufus, her first at the age of sixteen. Once freed from bondage, Williams also freed herself from Rufus. It’s a terrible account of a woman’s hardship. Foster explain the story and also looks at it from a different perspective, that of the enslaved man. Rufus had no agency in the matter. As a slave, he was forced into the relationship. Male slaves had extremely limited agency when it came to issues of sexuality, as the book explains. Rufus’s body was a symbol and site of enslaved violation.

Rethinking Rufus’s chapters look at key themes without following a traditional chronology. Foster draws from a wide range of primary sources, from court cases to songs to art. Chapter One examines the objectification and distortions around black men’s bodies. Chapter Two explores manly autonomy and intimacy; families and more “traditional” forms of living a male ideal as husband and father were impossible in slavery. The ugliness of coerced reproduction is explored in the third chapter. Foster provides an overview of the debates with scholarship over the years, sketches the ways that the issue was interpreted, and concludes that the practice was widespread and a key component in the narrative of pain and suffering of slaver. Chapter Five focuses on white women and enslaved black men; the penultimate chapter looks for ways of exploring same-sex relationships in slavery. The historical record does not offer the scholar much of direct sources. Foster’s conclusion calls for a rethinking of the community in slavery.

The book is well-researched, well-written and well-argued. I expect that it will be taught for many years to come. It is also an important reminder that as we do more research and more work on slavery, the more we are aware of its lasting evil.

David Potash

December 9, 2019 Reviews

High-Quality Humanized Potboiler?

One of the challenges living close to Myopic Bookstore – perhaps Chicago’s best used bookstore – is that it’s convenient, inexpensive, stays open late, and (did I say this already?), is perhaps Chicago’s best used bookstore. My shelves seem to fill without planning. It’s not a lack of discipline, either on my part. There are just so much good things to read . . . .

Recently I picked up a novel by John D. MacDonald, one of my favorite writers. Known for his mysteries, MacDonald also penned more than a few stand alone novels. He wrote, wrote – and wrote some more. If you like his style – taut, cleverly plotted, every character sketched with care, ample philosophizing but rarely in a didactic manner – you will recognize his prose within a paragraph or two. It’s tight and consistently entertaining.

At a recent Myopic visit I picked up one of his books that was a complete unknown to me. Written in 1984, One More Sunday is a sprawling novel about a large and successful evangelical church in the South. Chock full with a wide range of characters, the book is also about good and bad behavior. In fact, most of it is about wickedness. It covers the loss of faith, lust, adultery, envy, lying, murder, extortion and theft. There’s enough crime and creepiness in the book that it could veer into parody.

However, MacDonald’s skill gives the reader a page-turner with tolerance, ambiguity, and more than a little reflection. He leavens the luridness with compassion. That’s a welcome trait in a book that could only become an R movie.

If you run across it, give One More Sunday a chance – especially for the beach, the vacation, or when you want a high-quality diversion.

David Potash

November 13, 2019 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Romanticism vs. Snark vs. History

Period dramas – especially those from the BBC – have never really resonated with me. There’s a great deal of Victorian or Edwardian television and film out there, and many people love it. Friends can rail on about the beautiful clothing and the lifestyles, sometimes imagining that it truly was a golden age. I’m keen on history, but I’ve never thought that things were all that wonderful 120 years ago. As it turns out, there’s good reason for my skepticism – and it’s shared by at least one witty author.

Therese Oneill tackles the topic in a very funny and interesting book, Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners. It’s driven by a brilliantly simple concept: what were the basics of female life like for upper middle class women in around 1900? Oneill readily admits up front that she is not exploring the lives of women workers or the poor. Instead, she zeroes in on the women of some means who had maids, help, and lots of clothes. These might be the heroines of those popular films and novels. She’s writing to inform and to have some fun. Oneill, too, has wondered about the romantic nostalgia for the period.

Oneill looks at daily living for upper class women. What does one wear? How does one go to the bathroom? How do you clean yourself? Do you eat a lot or a little? How did women deal with menstruation, make up, courtship and married life? She draws from academic history, popular history, and primary sources. These topics may have been “unmentionable” in polite society, but they matter. They also reflected deeper issues about health, society, and the role of women. Oneill writes about it with a healthy degree of snark.

Victorian life was dirty and smelly, even for the well to do. What we now consider as normal hygiene (fresh running water, toilets, toilet paper, showers, clean towels, shampoo and soap) was far from normal. It’s hard to romanticize thirty-plus pounds of clothing without underwear to allow for easier trips to a commode. And while it may look for familiar through photographs and the media, life then was shorter and difficult.

Oneill’s jokes and narrative asides work well when it comes to topics such as peeing and cleaning up. They are much less effective when it comes to what’s dangerous, like arsenic in make up. And they do not work at all when she references slavery, or the extraordinary thorough misogyny that was woven through virtually all aspects of life. Women simply did not not have the rights, opportunities, protections or agency that they do today – and that is not the appropriate topic for a quip. In fact, the book’s message underscores the hard fact that women had very little agency.

Unmentionable is a quick and entertaining read. I learned from reading it and it made me smile. It also made me wish that the author had not spent so much time looking for a laugh and had instead been comfortable being serious every now and then. Oneill did her homework. I think that she could have trusted her readers to follow her to some more uncomfortable realizations – as well as to appreciate what has and has not changed in the decades since.

David Potash

October 6, 2019 Reviews

An Unblinking, Forward Looking Eye

There’s a hard and provocative edge to Jennifer Egan’s award-winning novel, Look at Me. Not quite clinical, the book nevertheless possesses a clarity of focus that makes one think. The book came out in 2001 and it has an eerie ability to zero in on trends and directions. Egan forecast many important features of our twenty-first century lives, from undercover terrorists to reality television to the web’s troubled relationship with authenticity. It is not a book about the future, but this many years on, it is difficult not to be aware of its prescience.

Look at Me is a novel of several moving pieces. At its center is Charlotte, a thirty-something model from Rockford, Illinois, whose face was destroyed in an automobile crash. Surgery gives her a new appearance and raises many questions. Charlotte had long been somewhat disassociative and her choices often complicated, if not downright self-destructive. She fled her childhood home and her life as a model had been all about, unsurprisingly, appearance. Charlotte’s new face calls her identity into question, as does an extended recuperative stay in Illinois.

This theme – identity and its power to define and confuse – are traced through several other characters: childhood friends of Charlotte’s, children and relatives, an alcoholic detective, and a fugitive who adopts a new persona. The characters interact in a complicated dance that at times feels just a tiny bit too pat, but nonetheless is satisfying.

Egan casts a wide net of social commentary throughout. There are some mild moves into farce or satire, but it is not the focus. Egan’s deeper instincts are more philosophical. She is, at heart, a novelist keen on telling a story and explaining something important about modern life, alienation and identity. Even as she cares about her characters, Egan maintains a discipline throughout.

Egan is a very smart writer. This novel is engaging, but engaging from a distance. Reading it felt a bit like pulling things up through binoculars. Everything is a little sharper, a little more clear – and without a strong sense of knowing exactly where we are. We cannot really trust what is just outside the frame. I enjoyed Look At Me even as I found it disconcerting. It is a good novel.

David Potash

October 3, 2019 Reviews

Comanches & Popular History

S.C. Gwynne, a journalist who has written for Time, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News and other publications, as well as authored several books, wrote Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History in 2010. A best-seller, Empire was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was optioned. It is now being made into a movie. The book contains several stories that are fascinating, compelling, and have “legs” as they say in the film industry. It draws people in over a long period of time – even if they pick it up knowing something about the subject.

My knowledge of Native American history is thin. I do know enough, however, to know that I cannot speak with real authority. I’m also very aware that working in the field can be very challenging on a host of levels, from sourcing to audience to genre. Historians can be contentious. Further, it is difficult, if not impossible, to write history without moral awareness and judgments. What can one do with the story of US expansion and the destruction of native American lives and culture? All that said, the histories and the stories of the frontier can be extraordinarily gripping.

S.G. Gwynne, I would wager, was cognizant of this and more when he tackled Empire. It appears to be thoroughly researched. Gwynne’s arguments, too, are more journalistic than historical. In other words, he looks more to the traditional “Who? What? Where? When? Why?” questions than issues of continuity and change, which often trouble historians. He does not care much about trying to unpack what is contingent and what is causal. The outcome – a very strong book – makes for engaging reading and perhaps something less than a long, fully developed argument.

What Gwynne does tell us about the Comanches, their role within that larger environment, and the US settlers and government to remove and/or control them, is fascinating. It’s a heroic and brutal history, with endurance, bravery, violence, murder, rape, torture and horror. The Comanches and other neighboring peoples fought to the death. There was no surrender. That kind of finality found its way to Spanish, Texan and American fighters, too, leading to a culture of courage and cruelty. The Comanches, however, seemed to do it better – and more effectively – than anyone else. Gwynne’s account of their horsemanship and battle techniques left me amazed. Life was extremely tough for everyone on the frontier.

Quanah Parker embodies those contradictions. The child of a Comanche leader and an Anglo woman who was captured as a child (as her family was slaughtered), Quanah was a brilliant military commander, a take-no-holds fighter, and eventually, after a full surrender, an effective spokesman for his people. He was also very popular with key white American figures. Gwynne works hard at making sense of Quanah’s world and the world of his mother. Everyone faced difficult choices and multiple constraints. At the same time, many also were able to carve paths for themselves that were truly extraordinary.

Read the book. Watch for the movie. And consider reading more widely and investigating more deeply similar scholarship. I think that I will – it’s extremely interesting.

David Potash

August 21, 2019 Reviews

The Devil’s Highway Remains Relevant

The border between Mexico and the United States has been a cruel space for many decades. The pull northward for opportunity is enticing, but the journey can be deadly, especially for undocumented immigrants. In 2001, twenty-six such Mexicans attempted the crossing. They had the great misfortune to have the wrong guides at the wrong time who chose the wrong path. Fourteen of them died of the terrible heat of the desert.

Luis Alberto Urrea, an award-winning author and professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, learned about the tragedy in 2004. He decided to investigate. Urrea’s background informed his approach to the project. His father is Hispanic, his mother Anglo, and he grew up in San Diego, where the border is a significant presence. He researched the story thoroughly, talking with as many of the participants as he could, from immigrants to border patrol agents. The result, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, is a gripping and harrowing account of the event. Also an examination of the border and the many people who live and work around it, the book became a best-seller, a Pulitzer prize finalist, and the recipient of many awards. The book is regularly taught and read today.

The Devil’s Highway is lyrically written. Urrea’s prose is dramatic and compelling. The people in the book are described with compassion and understanding. There are no cartoon villains – even the coyotes who led the immigrants to their death are treated with empathy. Unfortunately, there are also no heroes who were able to erase the suffering or to stop future tragedies. The broader situation, the gross inequity, and poor policy, practice and culture doomed these immigrants – and many more before and after. It’s a haunting book.

I wish that I could say that things are better now at the border. Clearly, they are not. Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway remains as relevant as ever. It’s a difficult story and an amazingly good read.

David Potash

July 8, 2019 American Culture Today, Reviews