Reviews RObert morris and Greg Waldmann Books, New & Noteworthy

Nevada by Imogen Binnie 262 pp // Topside // 2013 // $11.87

A deconstruction of authority from a person who knows what authority is. First things first: the main character of this book is not the narrator. The novel is written with the style and cathartic candor of a blog and while this is a tone that the main character often employs, she is distinctly separate from the narrator. The main character in question, Maria, is a brilliantly realized transwoman straining against the queer Brooklyn sub-culture she has ingratiated herself within. In- teraction with authority—how one defines oneself, and how one is defined by the agents of societal authority—is constant- ly on her mind. Characters swell and ebb, and snap and flee—the second half of the book details the interaction of Maria with a man she badly wants to believe is trans himself. Here is where we see that, in fiction as in life, narrative authority is precise, im- passionate, and consummate, and that this is poignantly so for the classes of people striving for identity. (rm)

What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer 1072 pp // Vintage // 1993 // $16.48

Cramer spent the last years of his life working on a biogra- phy of the baseball player Alex Rodriguez. Near death he gave up, having realized too late that he’d chosen a vacant subject.

Clarion 17 73 In What It Takes, his magisterial chronicle of the 1988 presi- dential primaries, he manages to wring from the vacancy of modern elections a novelistic, almost Victorian exegesis of the psychological and social forces that drive American pol- itics. No one could do this in the today’s obsessively stage- managed contests. Cramer spent years embedded with these campaigns and brought out of it acute, memorable accounts of the transactional friendships of George H.W. Bush, the stolid moralism of Michael Dukakis, the hollowness of Dick Gephardt, and the pipedreams of Joe Biden. This is, by some margin, the finest piece of political journalism the has produced. (gw)

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner 416 pp // Scribner // 2013 // $13.60

Nothing like some fine Italian craftsmanship between your legs. For a book about sexual and romantic entanglements this one has strikingly few sex scenes. What it does have going for it is a mellifluous wander through the timeline of a young female artist as she emigrates from Reno (we will know her only by that name) to uptown Manhattan in the mid to late 70’s. She’s something of a motorcycle enthusiast and meets up with the older, but not scandalously so, minimalist artist/ scion of an Italian motorcycle company whose father made it big enslaving Amazon tribesman for cheap rubber. The plot is all over the map but it works as a whole, even if the chapters depicting that father’s youth are mostly pointless. What we do get is an intimate portrait of our young Reno told in stunning prose, disregarding time entirely like the genius of her memory suspended from a height. Too bad it dwells so

74 Winter 2014 often in others’ memories; too bad the narrative seems to care so little about her. (rm)

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner 186 pp // Coffee House // 2011 // $12.62

A gritty reboot of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Though Lerner has won many prestigious awards, the com- parison to Rilke might seem comical. I know little of Lerner’s poetry, but I know as much about his fiction as I do of Rilke’s, that is to say, I’ve read each of their single novels. Singular as they are, so the accomplishments of these books are mir- rored: long interior gloomy reflections on a self cresting over a new modernity, spiked with bouts of intoxication (Lerner) or Proustian ouroboreality (Rilke). The scenery is similar in both: parks, benches, rooms, roofs; so is the execution: meandering. The narratives are each displayed using poetic rather than prose structures, all the way down to sentence formation. And so the results are similar: in each book we get a glimpse into the mind of a young man not himself, knowingly so. Each acknowledges that his is a self not long for this or any world, as they brace themselves to become some different future self. In Lerner’s book, plot is as unnecessary to the enterprise as narrative is in The Notebooks. (rm)

At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen 373 pp // Vintage // 1991 // $13.22

“Man’s culture,” Emerson wrote, “can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instru-

Clarion 17 75 ments, all enemies into power.” The material in Peter Mat- thiessen’s lush novel is the South American jungle and the na- tive tribes living in it, harmonized to its rhythms. Civilization can abide neither and crashes into the hinterland: a family of missionaries arrives to convert the heathens, while mercenar- ies work on behalf of the local government to bomb them into submission. But these men and women of the West scarcely realize how disaffected they are. They find meaning in the jungle, beyond the edges of their own society, but must in a terrible irony watch as the forces of certainty and greed they brought with them tear it all apart. I can think of no fiction that better conveys the terrifying power of modern culture to destroy and absorb the worldly material outside of it. (gw)

The Collected Poems by Frank O’Hara 586 pp // University of // 1995 // $25.13

Lyrical but unpretentious, frivolous but meaningful, manic yet controlled, the poetry of Frank O’Hara is above all en- dearing. He tells us he is “happily conceited / in all inventions and / divertissements. I hardly even notice hurricanes any- more,” but don’t believe him, he’s just in a mood. Let him take you down the streets of Manhattan, while he grabs a bite and runs into an epiphany:

I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab.

76 Winter 2014 There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

What’s true is that O’Hara builds most of his poetry out of little things, those errant wisps that flit about our conscious- ness and shape our moments. (gw)

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith 320 pp // Penguin // 2010 // $14.56

One of the best critics of the young twenty-first century, Smith is in one sense a throwback to the young critics of the early twentieth, who were not afraid to say “I” when they meant to tell you something. But while they cultivated a voice of authority, Smith channels the uncertainty of her age. “I’m forced to recognize,” she writes, “that ideological inconsis- tency is, for me, practically an article of faith.” And that is her virtue: she writes lucidly and persuasively, but you will hardly ever find in her essays the casual dismissals that sometimes mar the work of her forebears. On literature, movies, family, race, and gender, Smith writes like a calf-eyed explorer, like she is learning next to you even when she is disabusing you of some ignorant preconception. She is open to you, and so you are to her. (gw)

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