Book Reviews

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B oo k r E v i e w s

Mapmaking by Megan Harlan BkMk Press, 2010

“For my living, I learned the language,” the speaker of Megan Harlan’s poem “Inhabited” tells us, and it feels right to say no less of the poet herself. Mapmaking, Harlan’s debut book and the winner of the 2010 John Ciardi Prize, is an embodiment of knowledge, inquiry, and above all, language— supple, exacting, slippery, exuberant, diaphanous, and beguiling. The collection opens with “Ex Libris,” which tells us “Here is the fossil as a perfume.” And much of Mapmaking continues this project of ventur- ing beyond walls, book covers, and giving sensuous life to the past and the means of our remembering. Whether engaged with window boxes, clubs in Alphabet City, “California,” “Atget’s Paris,” the design of cemeteries, “shards of sagas / broke from former epochs, resolutions, / pieces of my history jigsawed / from old versions of the future,” or “scar-lines deeper than their healing,” Harlan’s poems are nimble and imaginatively fleet, but never far from a beating heart, a breathing and dreaming body. No small part of the pleasures to be found in Mapmaking arise from Har- lan’s far-flung sources of curiosity and inspiration. Whether bent towards poems like “Farsickness,” “Saraab,” or “Caravansary,” and various meth- ods of expansion upon (and through) etymology, or pulled into centrifu- gal meditation in the five-part poem “Motherland,” Harlan shows us the range and territory of play possible in the “literal-minded.” In addition to the large-scale geography of imagination at work in Mapmaking, Harlan is also very much engaged in poem-level events such as line, form, and sound. The poems often unfold in regularized stanzaic 116 Book Reviews

forms like quatrains and couplets, but quite a few also rush forth in one sweep down the page. Many of the poems make great use of extended syn- tax, long lines and generous syncopations, alliterations, and near-rhyme, though the landscape is also punctuated with the short, terse, and taut. Harlan’s fluid, quicksilver diction and sweeping frames of reference also render haunting, echoing mouthfuls of allusion and evocation—such as the moment in “Sierra Lake,” when “over granite stones smelling of silver and clay, / our words bright as coins thrown in a fountain,” bring echoes of say, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, or even Anne Carson or Word- sworth, without taking us out of intimacy with this moment, this lake, “winter poured free of its glacial heart.” Or “Atget’s Paris,” which brings us visions of “rag-and-bone men posed and waxen,” simultaneously evoking W.B. Yeats and his great ars poetica, while bringing us closer to the literal body of Atget’s work and photography. Attempts to sum up the work that Megan Harlan’s Mapmaking under- takes in its movement and unfolds in its lines and sounds brings much more difficulty and less satisfaction than reading the book itself. Through- out this debut book, Megan Harlan makes a sustained, varied and joyous job of singing “like figurated calligraphy / in a root, arterial language.”

—Zayne Turner

Wait by Alison Stine University of Wisconsin Press 2011

Alison Stine’s second collection, Wait, chosen by Cornelius Eady for the 2011 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, picks up the legacy and obsessions introduced in her first volume, Ohio Violence. Both works inhabit worlds flooded with force, ferocity, and full-blooded appetites for eros and thanatos. In both works, we find poems embodying a strong sense of language and line. But in Wait, the language and line are coupled with (or perhaps, more accurately, are governed by) a voice both steady in its imaginative movements and controlled in its lexicon—one haunted by birds, trees, wires and thread, stars, skin and the body. In the furious swirl that is “Gossip,” we learn: “I had splinters in my shoulder, / and milk paint in my veins. My back was a yarn / scratch... / Our bodies, / pale as stitched stars, made the shapes you say.” In the final moments of “Thief,” the speaker exhorts: Book Reviews 117

Let me have this: time he told; our clothes, stepping stones

to the field where we lay before

breaking, before bitterness, before discovery. Let me bring it to my mouth.

Let me pull it from my tongue, and candle

to the light. And call it mine.

Or the almost fugally structured, meditative “Reelection”:

Everything is sharper. Birds become birds.

Spearheads crystallize into trees. Those lines? They are called branches. That sky

with white? I had never seen. All the signs

are signs we’ve forgotten. The wind makes mouths of them, yesterday’s names. ... Such things

are worth seeing. You have to bend yourself back for them. You have to look until there is

no more looking, the wingspan lost to the leaves.

This winnowing, recombining language is mirrored by the book’s dramatic focus—ostensibly a single year, prior to the wedding of the young woman who is the central speaker and guide. But the poems, while operating under guise of both narrative/dramatic arc and persona, buck against the limits of this world, seeming to flash forward, in poems like “Scissors, Hammer, Hoof Pick, Awl,” which opens “When the woman threatened the son of my husband, / I went to the bank.” Or the poem “Real Estate,” where the speaker tells us “We can live in the in-between. / We can live. Gondola Tree. Married tree. / This is how our love came back: it never left.” There are also poems that refuse to be placed inside or outside of the collection’s narrative arc, like “The Flies,” in which the speaker begs an ambiguous lover:

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Do you see now what I wanted? Do you think of my body

winged? Fill me, as you promised. Find me

trapped, and let the hundreds go, let the little ones outside. Bitter would not be bitter.

My petal tongue would rise. Cloud,

I drank you; you were mine. What of the flies? Poison slunk beneath the gate;

I will give them halos. I will make them saints.

It feels appropriate to read Wait as an exploration in the vein of Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, with the use of book-length study and concentrated personae, vivid image and death-haunted ecstatic motion. And it is when pushing against the limits of personae that Stine’s language bursts forth most powerfully. Poems such as “Velata,” which focuses on the subject of a portrait by Raphael, pushes persona through layers of ekphrasis, history (scholars speculate that the woman, long considered to have been Raphael’s mistress, may actually have been his wife), and further personae, as we watch the book’s main speaker working to embody the life of the portrait-sitter, “a baker’s daughter.../ half-naked, half-glaze, sheer / across her stomach, holding out / her breast.” But along with the fluidity of imagination required by persona, Stine also has a strong sense of the still- life, the power in the mundane moment bent strange under the weight of its own bleak passage, like Van Gogh of the Potato Eaters or, even more, Carolyn Forché of Gathering the Tribes. This flashes through in poems like “The Flood,” where we discover:

That be a dollar, said the Amish at market when we lingered over their bread, said as if willing the loaf’s transformation into our arms. So at first the rain was welcome. We thought it was our doing. ...

In ditches and gullies, the grass ran like cilia, and the water was not pure. No. It was full of us, flaked with rock and wood, the leavings of our bodies, which left us, floated, were lost. Book Reviews 119

Or “Impetus”:

Hours before ice, you pull everything off its ropes, heirlooms hitting the plastic bucket. Life starts from the inside, bitter, compact and blooms as it softens, flushes with age. The tomatoes might pink if we wrapped them in paper—

Whether in distilled meditation, a breathless push of image and imagination, hopping across couplets or rolling out in a single, sustained stanza, the poems of Wait invite readers to experience the world with more than eyes moving over lines and hands turning pages. Through the restraints imposed by recurring images, narrowed lexicon and proposed by (and in) the dramatic focus, Wait begs readers to push past the limits of these impulses, rise with innate rhythms and unstoppable imagination of the speaker into the world of song and sky. As the opening poem, “Wife,” tells us: “I am a bird / in the field and I want you to find me. / I want you to find me. Tell me wait.”

—Zayne Turner

Richard Yates by Tao Lin Melville House, 2010

Tao Lin has earned a slice of fame through ambitious self-promotion, a ubiquitous blogosphere presence, and small press publication, culminating in a rise to places such as the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Atlantic. Interestingly, mere literary respect has not fulfilled Tao Lin. For his latest book he solicited a blurb from James Frey, nominated himself for the Pulitzer Prize, and spoofed Jonathan Franzen in the Stranger, among other “clever” pranks. With a certain charm, though, he succeeds, especially in pushing today’s youth toward literature. When he pisses in the night, his established cult following lauds him for shining a golden stream of light into the dark. Past work exhibits substance and thoughtfulness, and his rising popularity is no fluke. An apt comparison of Tao Lin’s style 120 Book Reviews

might work with early David Foster Wallace or Bret Easton Ellis, yet each writer has different objectives, motivations, and evolution. Wallace battled the addictive onslaught of television and pop culture within a search for himself, and Ellis confronted nihilism in a refreshingly transparent way. Tao Lin is also a unique stylist, but the tangible contrasts are that Tao Lin may have diverged too far in promoting his brand with Richard Yates, a novel that has no obvious relation to the author of Revolutionary Road, and much to do with the “Tao Lin” label. What is his subject matter? It remains the mundane: Quasi-lost youth shoplift, read books but rarely discuss them, eat vegan, and cogitate on megamouth sharks, dolphins, and hamsters. The glitch, though, is that the novel fails to satisfy. The novel steals the names and ages of two celebrities, twenty-two year-old Haley Joel Osment (born 4/10/1988), and sixteen-year-old Dakota Fanning (born 2/23/1994). A relationship develops between a twenty-two- year-old Tao Lin alter-ego, Haley Joel Osment, and his obsessed sixteen- year-old love interest, Dakota Fanning (the novel uses names in their en- tirety). They meet online then in person, they fornicate, and she reveals a plethora of dysfunction as Haley Joel Osment maintains nonchalance. Her entreaties include: “sit on top of me and hit me” and “I don’t want to kill myself. I want to be in a happy and healthy relationship with you” and “I might kill myself soon, killing myself is the only way I will ever positively affect anyone.” He is not ready nor inclined to play counselor: “Thank you for emailing about those things…there have been many times I wanted to leave you but because of circumstance I couldn’t” and “After four days Haley Joel Osment said he had been mean recently and could have been nicer.” Even their sex lacks passion: “he was quiet and did not move while it was happening.” When she tells Haley Joel Osment she has been raped the confession evokes indifference. Such deadpan treatment of larger issues constitutes a major weakness. That this flaw thematically replicates adds to the readerly frustration. A greater problem with the novel, however, is the tedious verisimilitude of “Gmail chat” prose and dialogue. The rare contemplative sentence drowns in oceans of regurgitations about shoplifting, vegan food, and ab- solute zero of Kelvin proportion. Much transpires as follows: “he ordered bean curd in garlic sauce. He walked holding his cell phone with one hand and his food with another hand to his room” and “He walked into a taco place and ordered a bean burrito. He met the editor and they drove to someone’s house” and “He put the camera in her bag. He petted her hair Book Reviews 121 and looked across the aisle at contact lens solutions. He saw the brand he used. He saw other brands.” Even the metaphorical vegan might starve in this dearth of intellectual nourishment. In Richard Yates Tao Lin continues to evoke the conundrums and ennui of twenty-first-century youth. Yet, in excess, these themes under- mine this magnificently boring novel. The substantive issues: juvenile sex, low self-esteem in young girls, and how to confront the otiose nature of life are explored at surface level only. Though the established Tao Lin fan might enjoy the redundant melancholy and pseudo-redemptive ending of Richard Yates, to ascend further Tao Lin must target an audience that does not already love Tao Lin.

—Caleb Powell

Room by Emma Donoghue Little Brown and Co., 2010

Writers have long used child characters to narrate adult stories, and it is not difficult to see why. Celebrated literary children such as Scout Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird and the title character of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew reveal that some stories are more truthfully conveyed by wit- nesses who do not understand their sordid details. Emma Donoghue’s im- portant novel Room, which was short-listed for the 2010 Booker Prize, is a contemporary take on this time-honored convention. Told through the first-person perspective of a bright five-year-old named Jack, Room chroni- cles a story of human inventiveness and maturation in the face of inhuman depravity, without resorting to vulgar or violent spectacle. Jack and his mother, known throughout the novel only as Ma, live together in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room. For Ma, the room is a dungeon in which she was imprisoned nearly a decade ago, at the age of nineteen, by a strange man. For Jack, however, the room is a world filled with “thou- sands of things to do.” He spends his days making toys out of egg shells and cardboard rolls; doing word games, math puzzles and Phys Ed; cleaning, cooking, drawing, and watching no more than one daily hour of educa- tional television (save for the days when Ma is “gone,” Jack’s word for her lapses into a catatonic depression, leaving him to watch as much TV as he 122 Book Reviews

pleases). Because the room and its objects are the only ones of their kind known to Jack, they become for him characters in their own right. He re- fers to the room as simply Room, while the bed is Bed, and the plant, Plant. Aside from overhearing (from inside the wardrobe where he sleeps) Ma’s nightly visits from a man called Old Nick, whose presence Jack is unable to fully reconcile with his worldview, Jack appears both happy and well-adjusted. Clearly, Ma has worked hard to foster his development, to provide him with mental stimulation and as normal an existence as pos- sible for a five-year-old who has never seen the outside world. The book’s epigraph is an excerpt from the Simonides fragment, “Danae and Perseus Adrift,” a myth that beautifully reflects Jack’s and Ma’s life inside Room:

My child Such trouble I have. And you sleep, your heart is placid; you dream in the joyless wood; in the night nailed in bronze, in the blue dark you lie still and shine.

For the first five years of Jack’s life, Ma encourages his perception of Room as the only world there is, not wanting him to know that he is being deprived of anything. Her decision to transcend her own victimization in order to create a peaceful life for him is obviously an act of great love. Throughout the portion of the novel set in Room, Jack’s childish nar- ration works well. In an interview, Donoghue describes creating Jack’s voice by charting her own young son’s language development “like an anthropol- ogist,” selecting a few “classic five-year-old traits to give to [Jack’s] speech.” Jack’s ungrammatical observations (“I eated”; “I winned”) are believable and serve to create a new kind of simplified dialect that makes sense within the simplified confines of Room. After a twist that comes about halfway through the novel, the narrative focus shifts to Outside. Almost immediately, Donoghue’s writing becomes weaker, scattered, and rushed. While Jack’s limited perspective is ideal for describing a world as small as Room (no adult narrator, after all, could so charmingly relate the events taking place around a toilet), it stops serving Donoghue when she expands the novel’s focus. She attempts to force ideas too complex for a five-year-old through Jack’s perspective, at times having him “overhear” large chunks of medicalese, which he oddly has the ability to recount verbatim. Donoghue wants to tell Ma’s story more than Jack’s story here, and Jack thus ends up becoming a mere narrative vehicle, rather Book Reviews 123 than a flesh-and-blood character, as he is in the first half of the novel. Ma, too, gets lost in the mix and takes an action that feels unbelievable and like one of the few instances in which the novel stoops to shock value. It is a disappointing finish for a work that starts out so strong. Despite this, Room remains a significant novel and one well worth reading. Donoghue told the Guardian she was “triggered” into writing it by accounts of the now infamous Fritzl case, in which an Austrian man imprisoned his daughter for twenty-four years inside a hidden basement chamber. Elisabeth Fritzl was raped by her father repeatedly and gave birth to seven children, three of whom were imprisoned in the basement with her. Elisabeth and her children were freed in 2008, and the youngest family member, a six-year-old named Felix, helped inspire the character of Jack. TIME Magazine reported that Felix Fritzl “cooed with joy” the first time he saw sunlight, and it is easy to see how a novelist like Donoghue, who draws much of her material from real world events, would be moved to explore such a detail in fiction. But perhaps more importantly, Donoghue joins a legacy of women writers, including Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro, who investigate the hidden dramas occurring within the confines of interior spaces. In The Lives of Girls and Women, Munro gets at the impetus behind this type of domestic exploration, writing: “People’s lives were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” By compar- ing a kitchen to an unexplored cave, Munro challenges the assumption that dramatic action cannot occur in a “dull,” domestic setting. Similarly, Donoghue’s decision to set over one hundred pages of her novel in a fifteen- by-fifteen room, inhabited only by a mother and young child, is a bold one because it is a feminist one. The scenes that unfold in Room may not be conventionally dramatic, but they are packed with meaning. They are sim- ple, but they are also amazing and unfathomable. While the space where Jack and Ma live is very small, the spaces inside their minds and hearts are very big. And it is these spaces that are sure to capture the literary imagina- tion of both readers and writers long into the future.

—Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark 124 Book Reviews

You Think That’s Bad: Stories by Jim Shepard Alfred A. Knopf, 2011

The stories in Jim Shepard’s latest collection, You Think That’s Bad, are as delightful as they are varied. Each contains a vibrant world with a distinctive set of problems. In “Low-Hanging Fruit,” a particle physicist fails to reconcile his aptitude for theory with his ineptitude as a husband. In “The Track of the Assassins,” the explorer Freya Stark and her tattered guide search for the citadel of the ancient Persian sect. Turn the page to “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” and you are in the year 2024, in which a hydraulic engineer is witness to the consequences of climate change and his eroded marriage. One of the chief pleasures of a Jim Shepard story is in not knowing who will inhabit it, and this collection reads like a survey course in hu- manity, cutting across class, continents, and centuries. It seems as if there is no consciousness that Shepard is unable to expertly pilot, and although he has claimed that his writing has no niche, he does have a predilection for the first-person narrator through which nine of these eleven stories are told. Each character is rendered with such limitless perception that it is as if Shepard is recounting his previous lives, an feat made possible not only by the powerhouse of his imagination, but also by the staggering amount of research that he invests in his fiction (I counted seventy-three sources listed in his acknowledgments). While these stories are not tethered to any particular theme, many of their characters struggle to explain why they behave in ways that hurt themselves or those who love them. “I’m not the world’s worst husband,” says the particle physicist who has abandoned his wife to study at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, “but there’s a whole lot I’d walk away from to be a part of something even one-third as cool as this.” “What am I up to?” asks the hydraulic engineer after he keeps an inheritance secret from his family. “Your guess is as good as mine.” These personal disasters occur in the foreground of vivid and danger- ous lands that showcase a menagerie of violence, from avalanches to jungle warfare to depraved murderers in fifteenth-century France. Shepard wields such catastrophes to split open his characters, who often reveal something intimate about themselves despite their best efforts. In this way, each story Book Reviews 125

is a biopsy of the human soul, placed under a microscope for you to exam- ine the forms, wishes, and contradictions that make being human such a hazardous enterprise.

—Joe B. Sills