Comics! Great Expectorations!

It's Marvel Comics' show this week at the comic shop, and the obvious reason is the launch of yet another sooper-dooper multi-crossover event, "Fear Itself." If you're thinking it's been only a very short time since the end of the previous sooper-dooper multi-crossover, you're entirely right, and what's even odder is how similar "Fear Itself" is to its predecessor, "Siege," in so many ways. In both cases, continuity-wide changes are promised that almost certainly won't happen; in both cases, the central story revolves around Thor and his fellow Asgardians - and in both cases, the actual issue-by-issue execution of writing and art will in all likelihood be irresistible. The writer-artist team here is Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen, and the first issue is so good that even a reader as sceptical as I am will be entertained even while they're muttering "but, but."

Our story so far: the Asgardian god of fear, Skadi, has delusions of all-fatherhood and has seeded the human world with hammers that look bigger and sleeker than Thor's famous Mjolnir, and Skadi is found by the daughter of Captain America's old foe the Red Skull. As those two start to cook up eee-vil, a more domestic strife is brewing in the city of Asgard itself, which crashed into the Oklahoma plain at the end of "Siege." Thor's irascible father Odin, the original all-father of the gods, is irritated that Thor is joining with his mortal allies the Avengers to rebuild Asgard. Odin interrupts a feast his people are sharing with the Avengers in order to tell everybody that Asgard is returning to the stars, that he's rebuilding Bifrost the Rainbow Bridge and taking all the Norse gods and godlings back home (the ominous Watcher shows up briefly to, um, watch - which enrages Odin still further, prompting him to shout "I am the father of all things! I am the fury and the extinction! The leader of souls! The commander of warrior gods!" It brought back many memories, for this long-time Thor fan).

He demands that Thor choose between his mortal and immortal loyalties, and when Thor chooses mankind, Odin slaps him around just for kicks and tells him he's coming back to Asgard anyway. The all-father senses that Skadi has returned, and he's obviously preparing for the battle that's coming, in which the heroes of Asgard and Earth will face off against the god of fear and his hammer-wielding warriors. Fraction has very little in the way of character-based writing to do here (and far too many opportunities for social commentary, but what can you do?), it being basically a premise-setting issue, but Immonen's artwork is yet another step forward in a progression that hasn't slowed down since "Superman: Secret Identity." Although even upward progressions can have nervous tics, I guess, and this issue certainly does: everybody spits. The good guys, the bad guys - there's spittle everywhere. We can hope for dry mouths in future issues.

Marvel's other ongoing 'big event' mini-series, "Avengers: The Children's Crusade," continues this week as well, with really good writing by Allan Heinberg and rip-snortingly fantastic artwork by Jim Cheung. In the last issue, the fat hit the fire when the impetuous Young Avengers went to Latveria in order to find the long-lost Scarlet Witch, who fled there and gave herself amnesia in the wake of the "House of M" storyline. We learned that she had fallen in love with Latveria's king, Doctor Doom - and that he had fallen in love with her and very much didn't want her to remember her own past, for her sake and humanity's safety. The grown-up Avengers followed the Young Avengers, and Magneto (the Scarlet Witch's father) followed as well, and a gigantic, predictable battle ensued that was momentarily interrupted by the return of Iron Lad, the teenager who would grow up to be Kang the Conqueror, and who in this issue helps the Young Avengers to spirit the Scarlet Witch back in time to an alternate time-line - only time-travel is very complex, and they don't really know what they're doing, and by issue's end all they've succeeded in doing is restoring her memories and thereby putting the whole Marvel Universe at risk.

If that all sounds confusing, that's because it is - but then, this issue is just the mid-point in the mini-series, so some amount of textual muddle is to be expected, Cheung's artwork certainly makes the confusion easy to bear, including yet another eye-popping two-page splash panel like the one we commented on last time:



And Heinberg's writing is very enjoyable too, including his ongoing and very refreshing characterization of Doctor Doom as a bit more complex than he's usually portrayed. "She was happy here," he tells the Avengers. "We were to be married." And when Magneto says, "My daughter would never have married you. Not willingly. What have you done to her?" Doom's response is chillingly correct:

I have been trying to save her. From You. From all of you ... who sought to destroy her. And now, because of you, the most powerful force in the universe has been unleashed into the timestream, where she can rewrite the past or the future just as easily as she said the words "No more mutants."

Two big event-titles, both firing on all cylinders, and yet the Marvel comic that pleased me most this week was a regular old ongoing title that hardly ever pleases me at all: "The Uncanny X-Men." Marvel has been coming out with "Point 1" issues of its books, billed as good jumping-on points for potential new readers who might be leery of picking up titles in the middle of long-running stories. This latest issue of "Uncanny X-Men" is one of those: 534.1 (that "534" seems utterly unbelievable to yours truly, but we'll let that go), written by Kieron Gillen and pencilled by Carlos Pacheco. It has a straightforward, two-pronged plot: the X-Men (now basically comprising almost all the handful of mutants who were left on Earth after those three little words "No more mutants" - including both former villain Magneto and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, who, as the super-powered son of a human man and a woman from Atlantis, was Marvel's first mutant long before anybody but Mendel had ever heard the word) race to stop an evil group of scientists from causing a major earthquake, and a media consultant tries to work with Magneto to improve his image with the public. I certainly wasn't expecting the issue to please me more than those big-e events for which I admit I have a sweet-tooth, but it did: Gillen's writing sparkles, and of course Pacheco's artwork is always great. The highlight of the issue for me was Gillen's characterization of Namor as a bit of a lout, not a sterling super-hero at all. When he's confronting one of the evil scientists, for instance, he snarls, "Only Namor has the ability to make the earth move. And he reserves the privilege for one woman at a time. Unless they have experimental friends." That's a far cry from the 'tortured hero' conception of the character that held sway back in the '70s, but I like it just the same.

Of course, there's a couple of sooper-dooper crossover events brewing at DC Comics as well, but this week clearly belonged to Marvel. Maybe we'll get to Superman and Doomsday next time!

The New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse!

Our book today is Alastair Fowler's 1991 New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, and it's as volatile and tremendous a tribute to National Poetry Month as could be imagined. Opinion among those I've quizzed is decidedly mixed as to the merit of even having a National Poetry Month (one poet of my acquaintance summed things up by saying "it can't possibly have any widespread effect other than to further marginalize the most marginalized literature in America"), but that's surely a debate about browbeating the public, not about the worth of poetry itself. And no other period of human history can rival the 'long' 17th century for verse, that glorious epoch from roughly the final years of Queen Elizabeth I to the advent of the Glorious Revolution. As Fowler here reckons that time, it stretches from George Chapman all the way to Alexander Pope, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden.

There are lots and lots of other names in this updated version of the Oxford classic, including quite a few names that don't deserve to be here. Fowler is typically British in his diffidence:

A representative selection has meant more Drayton; more Cowley and Marvell; more Oldham and Strode; and many more female poets. It has meant including marginal figures such as the waterman Taylor, the alcoholic Brathwait, and the lunatic Carkesse. It has meant, in fact, including some 'subliterary' verse, and some very minor poets. If literature is the nation's memory, forgotten verse may contain things we need to know.

Or it may not. It's hard to imagine what even mercifully brief extracts from the life-outpourings of Emilia Lanier, John Chalkhill, or John Digby, the Earl of Bristol could teach us about much of anything, but if they and their ilk are the price of admission to the rest of this mighty host, you won't hear me complaining.

There's our old friend Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, writing about the cruelties of mankind and meaning, as she so often does, men, in this excerpt from 1653's "The Hunting of the Hare":

As if that God made creatures for man's meat,

And gave them life and sense, for man to eat;

Or else for sport, or recreation's sake,

Destroy those lives that God saw good to make;

Making their stomachs graves, which full they fill

With murthered bodies that in sport they kill.

Yet man doth think himself so gentle, mild,

When of all creatures he's most cruel wild;

And is so proud, thinks only he shall live,

That God a godlike nature did him give,

And that all creatures for his sake alone

Was made for him to tyrannize upon.

And there's Will Davenant, that weak-willed wit and wannabe wastrel who got his start in literary London while serving in the household of our old friend Fulke Greville and who, amidst stacks and stacks of intensely conventional writing, could occasionally produce something puckish and original, like this from 1673:

O Thou that sleepest like pig in straw,

Thou lady dear, arise:

Open, to keep the sun in awe,

Thy pretty pinking eyes;

And having stretched each leg and arm,

Put on your clean white smock,

And then, I pray, to keep you warm,

A petticoat on dock.

Arise, arise! Why should you sleep,

When you have slept enough?

Long since French boys cried 'Chimney-sweep',

And damsels 'Kitchen-stuff'.

The shops were opened long before,

And youngest prentice goes

To lay at his mistress' chamber door

His master's shining shoes.

Arise, arise; your breakfast stays:

Good water gruel warm,

Or sugar sops, which Galen says

With mace will do no harm.

Arise, arise; when you are up,

You'll find more to your cost,

For morning's draught in caudle cup,

Good nutbrown ale and toast.

And what of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the able poet and late-life friend of Ben Jonson? Drummond let a long and very active literary life, but in less inclusive anthologies than this one he might nevertheless get crowded right off the stage - either in favor of demographically advisable nonentities or to make room for more Shakespeare. Not so here, where we can read bittersweet little ditties like this bit fro Madrigal II.i, written in the first decade of the new century:

This life which seems so fair

Is like a bubble blown up in the air

By sporting children's breath,

Who chase it everywhere,

And strive who can most motion it bequeath:

And though it sometime seem of its own might,

Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,

And firm to hover in that empty height,

That only is because it is so light.

But in that pomp it doth not long appear;

For even when most admired, it in a thought,

A swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

I've praised these wonderful Oxford Books here before, but when it comes to anthologies this wide-ranging and thought-provoking, I don't mind repeating myself. And when I'm delighting in the acuity of Fowler's choices, I don't even mind all the makeweight names he was forced to mix in amongst them.

Jane Eyre!

Our book today is that venerable chart-topper from 1847, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a fast-paced, disarmingly playful, and incredibly lively book that's been egregiously mis-served for the last hundred years by the British and American teaching professions. If you're a product of a school anywhere in the West, you were no doubt force-fed Jane Eyre at some point in middle school or high school, required to read a certain number of chapters a week, perhaps quizzed on its contents before you were hurried on to Dickens. You were likely never allowed even so much as a moment to pause and think about what you were reading, let alone savor the fantastic atmosphere Charlotte Bronte so consistently evokes. You had to memorize bits about the madwoman in the attic, and maybe you got a little side-lecture on typhus and gruel. Your teachers might have had the best of intentions in doing this, but they nevertheless owe you an apology.

All middle school and high school teachers do, really, or rather, the programs they serve do. Those programs force students to march through a tour of classic novels long, long before those novels can ever possibly resonate with them personally - the combination of strange reading-settings and fascistic page-requirements usually has two effects more pronounced than all the others: it makes those students viscerally hate the very idea of reading, and it reserves their deepest hatred for the very books they should most love.

The more sensitive of those students, the ones who grow up to be lifelong readers despite the best efforts of their basic schooling to prevent that, almost always feel a nagging ambivalence toward 'the classics.' I hear it every day: "You know, I've always wanted to go back to those books I had to read in high school and really read them." Some of those grown-ups do just that, and I'd like to think those old classics don't let them down. These books were, after all, written for adults, not distracted children. High school students should certainly be required to read, of course (it's a muscle that needs exercising just as much as any other), but their requirements should be books they have at least a chance of actually liking - the goal should be to inculcate the love of reading, not to ram certain books down their throats.

You can always tell when a new movie adaptation of one of those high school assignments is in the theaters, because suddenly slightly abashed adults will be in the shops buying the book and vowing to read it. That's a very welcome development, whether the movie is any good or not.

There's a new movie-version of Jane Eyre in movie theaters right now, and I'll leave it to my colleague Mr. Anderson to tell you whether or not that movie is any good. My bailiwick here is books, and I can tell you one thing your teachers way back when might not have bothered to tell you: Jane Eyre is a very, very good book.

The plot will be hazily familiar to virtually everybody. Young Jane Eyre, having survived your standard-issue horrific Victorian-style childhood, takes a job at Thornfield Hall as governess to a young girl who's the ward of the Hall's master, Edward Rochester. Rochester is bluff and rough but dashing - he's stern with Jane but also clearly fascinated by her, as she is by him, and their mutual interest deepens to affection even while very odd things keep happening at the Hall (somebody sets Rochester's bed on fire one night, for instance, and Jane is forever hearing a strange cackling laugh echoing through the walls). Rochester tends to blame these things on a drunken servant, but it turns out that's only half-true: when the servant in question gets drunk, the real culprit - Rochester's estranged and insane wife, whom he keeps in the Hall's attic - escapes and wreaks havoc. Despite his married status, Rochester urges Jane to marry him. She refuses on principle and flees into the night. She encounters her kinsman St. John Rivers, a little prig who's every bit as stern as Rochester but nowhere near as sexy, and he begins pressuring her to marry him. She finds him drearily uninteresting (although she doesn't really allow herself to think about it in those terms), and when she eventually learns that a relative has left her enough money to make her independent for the rest of her life, she promptly returns to Thornfield Hall - and encounters only a smouldering ruin. The madwoman in the attic had finally succeeded in burning the place down (taking her own life in the process), leaving Rochester crippled and blind. Jane doesn't care about such surface things, however: she still loves only him. They get married, and his sight gradually returns.

You can see right off the great, primary-color elements that would attract a film director - which explains how often this story has been filmed. I've seen some fine performances of this basic material (my favorite being George C. Scott, although to my mind Colm Feore would make the perfect Rochester), although producers far too often shorten the spectrum dividing Jane from Rochester - they make her prettier than she is, and they make him younger than he is (even from the poster of this new film, you can see that's been done in this case too), thereby weakening one of the strongest elements of the book: that none of us can predict where love, real love, will strike.

One of the greatest ironies involved in all this camera-work is how much of Jane Eyre is essentially unfilmable. Charlotte Bronte herself often stresses this ineffable element in her book (time and again we're told what something doesn't look or sound like, as though our author only wants to eliminate wrong impressions in her readers' minds rather than implant right ones), and many of its most memorable scenes either fall flat if filmed as they're written (I'm thinking here of the aforementioned burning-bed scene, but there are lots of others) or contain visual delicacies far too fleeting for any clumsy camera to pick up. Two keys scenes, for instance, involve Jane in passionate night-time conversations in the moonlight. First with Rochester:

"I would not - I could not - marry Miss Ingram. You - you strange - you almost unearthly thing!  - I love as my own flesh. You - poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are - I entreat you to accept me as a husband."

"What, me!" I ejaculated: beginning in his earnestness - and especially in his incivility - to credit his sincerity; "me, who have not a friend in the world but you - if you are my friend: not a shilling but what you have given me?"

"You, Jane. I must have you for my own - entirely my own. Will you be mine? Say yes, quickly."

"Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face: turn to the moonlight."

"Why?"

"Because I want to read your countenance: turn!"

"There: you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled, scratched page. Read on: only make haste, for I suffer."

There's more light in the scene with St. John, but less heat. She catches him walking at sunset and talks to him while he watches the moon rise:

"Must we part this way, St. John? And when you go to India, will you leave me so, without a kinder word than you have yet spoken?"

He now turned quite from the moon, and faced me.

"When I go to India, Jane, will I leave you? What! do you not go to India?"

"You said I could not, unless I married you."

"And you will not marry me? You adhere to that resolution?"

Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure?

"No, St. John, I will not marry you. I adhere to my resolution."

In both these scenes, the interplay of natural light works an active, atmospheric magic that even the best cinematographer must perforce make crude - and Jane Eyre is full of such gauzy stuff. A movie may well capture the driving essence of the plot, but I suspect even the best movie will miss more of the book's true moor-spells than it hits.

But who knows? The new movie might succeed beyond my wildest expectations! And wait - did I say 'who knows'? The answer to that would probably be, "Mr. Anderson knows"!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Frilly Shirt, Discarded!

When last we left our hero Paul (now the proprietor of a snazzy new website of his own! Those of you who are casting directors - and you know who you are - click on over and line up to offer him work!), he was beginning to grasp once again that elemental poutiness that launched him to romance-cover stardom, after perhaps losing faith for a time and finding solace, as we've all done from time to time, by taking mercenary work in distant galaxies and doing some freelance paranormal gigs in New York City. Those stints offered an anonymity that was no doubt healing, but they required a heavy price in return: they required Paul to be fully clothed. For a male model, a pound of body armor and worsted wool is far worse than a pound of flesh. Paul may have executed these various adventures with the cool hand and consummate professionalism that are his trademarks, but looking at those covers, you can almost hear his luscious pecs yearning to break out and breathe free. We saw the beginnings of that self-realization dawn on Paul last time, and what started as a trickle will soon spurt to a torrent.

Like so many epic adventures, it all begins in Egypt. 1820 Egypt, to be specific, the setting for the opening scene of the delightful Deb Marlowe's 2008 Harlequin historical romance An Improper Aristocrat, which begins with a mysterious femme fatale spying on our Paul as he sits alone in his tent in the Valley of Kings. Her motives might be nefarious, but she's an excellent judge of model-meat:

Narrowing her gaze, she studied him. Ah, yes. The light might be dim, but it illuminated a feast for the discerning female eye: a strong, chiselled profile, impossibly broad shoulders, rugged muscles straining the fine linen of his shirt.

He set down his pen and indulged himself in a lengthy, catlike stretch. Even in so unwary a pose, she could sense his power, feel the pull of unwavering confidence and absolute masculinity. Inwardly, she smiled. This assignment, which she had objected to with vehemence, was going to be no hardship at all.

Ah, yes indeed - she no sooner parts his tent-flap than she's straddling him like a subway turnstile, and our boy Paul, bless his randy soul, takes it all in stride. Howard Carter and other wimpy Egyptologists would probably have complained about the heat.

Their impromptu coupling is brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of a scream, and Paul - here calling himself the Earl of Treyford - rushes outside to find his excavation partner, Richard Latimer, lying on the ground with a knife sticking out of his chest. Despite the fact that 'Trey' (the equivalent of the Earl of Rutland calling himself 'Rut,' but Marlowe - like her literary namesake, come to think of it - will have her own way) cries out the requisite "No!" Richard dies in his arms - but not before handing over a mysterious ancient amulet and making Paul swear to return to England and protect Richard's big sister Chione.

Paul swears (in all his adventures so far, he's never yet refused a dying request, despite the fact that they always get him into trouble - you'd think by this point he wouldn't bend over a dying friend until his iPod was safely blasting Lady Gaga into his ears, so his friend could gurgle impossible quests until the cows come home without Paul being the wiser), even though he has no love for England - where polite society views him as an unprincipled rake and adventurer - and no love for the idea of playing squire to some old maid and the two children she chaperones.

Needless to say, Chione in the flesh upends all his expectations (Marlowe is wonderful at crafting set-piece scenes that come off without a hitch; the chapter-section where Paul meets Chione is a pitch-perfect hoot, complete with a zinger at the end), and thanks to that mysterious amulet - and the sinister ancient society that's after it - the two of them are quickly embroiled in one adventure after another. Readers who expect the usual dinner-and-ball-room Regency romance here will be surprised right out of their petticoats. As noted, Paul himself must wrestle with similarly toppled expectations - and other, more powerful feelings:

Trey muffled a heartfelt curse. His head was still bent in the low-ceilinged corridor, an awkward position made more so by the child resting against his shoulder. Danger lay behind and the unknown ahead, and he must face it saddled with a woman and two children. This was hardly the first scrape he'd found himself in, but it ranked right up there with the worst of the lot. And despite all this, still his body reacted to the nearness of hers. To the scent of her hair. To the sound of her breathing in the darkness. For some reason he did not fully comprehend, all of this infuriated him.

Ah, that last line speaks volumes, doesn't it? And in the end what's important isn't that inexplicable rage - that's just par for the course when it comes to brooding rakehells, after all - but rather the fact that by this point in our odyssey, we can bloody well guess why Paul is infuriated. Hell, we can see it plain as day! The old Harlequin historicals (four a month, no overlapping time-periods!) all featured a separate black-and-white illustration on the inside cover that was meant to further the action of the full-color front cover, and in the case of An Improper Aristocrat, we can see the way the wind is blowing - it's blowing Paul's frilly shirt clean off his smooth-muscled torso!

That wind is the breath of the future, and it's blowing Paul toward his romance-cover destiny! We shall follow that blowing job in the next instalment!

Red Earth and Pouring Rain!

Our book today is Vikram Chandra's immense and phantasmagorical 1995 novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain, which is on one level about the fearful bargain struck by a wounded monkey to postpone his own death: an American college student on vacation back home in Bombay shoots a monkey that frequently visits his parents' house in Bombay, and when the death-god Yama comes to claim the wounded animal, it's revealed that the victim is actually the reincarnation of Sanjay Parasher, an Indian idealist and patriot from the days of the Raj. The monkey-allied god Hanuman makes a deal with the god of death: if Sanjay can tell stories that keep his host family entertained for two hours every day, he gets to keep on living. But the criteria are as harsh as ever ("Boredom is to be defined as an internal state, externally recognizable through signs such as shifting restlessly, talking to neighbours, playing with shoe-laces or other items, drooping of eyelids and nodding of head, et cetera, et cetera").

What's let loose by this fantastic premise is an endlessly inventive take on Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights, only Sanjay is not only the teller of the tales, he's also their relentless, ever-changing subject. It's the perfect vehicle for Chandra to indulge in his natural penchant for storytelling, and you might wonder if it isn't a trifle too perfect - nine out of ten authors, having dreamed up such a great premise, would proceed to use it as a justification for shameless laziness, for chucking onto the helpless page every single word that's ever appeared in their mind (this was the greatest failing of the late David Foster Wallace, and the encouraging of this laziness is the chief sin of McSweeney's-style Internet 'tendencies' that mistake self-consciously precious garrulity for anything other than a fast-flowing stream of pig-crap).

Luckily for all of us, Chandra is the tenth author, the exception, the one whose prolixity is actually both tightly controlled and enormously enjoyable. Readers can see this right away, in the crass admonitions the spew out of Yama when, at the book's beginning, he's closing in on his quarry, the hapless Sanjay-in-monkey-form:

'You mean, what next?' he said, suddenly laughing uproariously, exposing great white teeth. 'Where on the wheel is the next time around? Is it to be up a ladder or down the slippery back of a past misdeed, suddenly fanged? I don't know, Sanjay. Karma and dharma, those are mechanical laws sewn into the great fabric of the cosmos, you understand, mysterious in their functioning: there's no predicting the results of those deadly calculations, each deed producing a little burst of kharma to be weighed in those inscrutable balances; who knows, who can understand the subtle ways of dharma? - but you've undoubtedly been a bad monkey, Sanjay. Instead of attending to monkey dharma, you've haunted the dwellings of humans, begging to be captured, to be reintroduced, in one way or another, to the society of these clumsy but admittedly lovable creatures. In one life you allowed yourself to be captured by a princeling's hunters, and spent your time happily amusing spoilt young royalty, in another, you allied yourself with a blind holy-man, thus adding to his reputation as a miracle-worker and enabling him to carry on a life of debauchery and dissolution. In all your monkey-lives, you've ignored your natural relatives and hidden by ventilators and windows, listening to the speech of another species; haven't you noticed how easily you understood what these friends of yours were saying? Somewhere in your soul all those lives have left a sediment of the knowledge you acquired unknowingly, so now your speech is a curious melange of living words, dead expressions and buried and forgotten phrases.'

Red Earth and Pouring Rain isn't afraid of such garish elaborations, and Chandra is confident enough to wink at his readers about them:

As a rule, I am told by the ancient legends, Yama is shunned by inhabitants of the three worlds. It is hard to make light conversation with one who wears that deadly silver noose at the waist; consequently, when he gets a chance to talk, he tends to run on.

The stories that Sanjay tells range over two centuries and many dozens of settings (including an excursus on Jack the Ripper that's as unexpected as it is entertaining), and one similar, paradoxical flame lights them all, the dream of permanence ('You want never to die' Sanjay accurately tells another character, although given the novel's premise, the same obviously applies to himself as well). That dream is well-served by the storyteller's art, and that art is hardly better exemplified anywhere in modern fiction than in this novel of Chandra's (ironically, one of its only superiors might just be Chandra's next book, the booming, utterly masterful Sacred Games). As with many of the best long novels from the Tale of Genji to The Sot-Weed Factor, Red Earth and Pouring Rain leaves its readers both immensely satisfied and wanting more. It's a novel to read



and then re-read



(always remembering that when it comes to reincarnation as an animal, there are worse fates than being a monkey ...)

Promise of Plenty in the Penny Press!

An exceedingly enjoyable day in the Penny Press, proving once again its unending (one hopes) plenty, its aggregate ability to laughter, stimulation, and irritation to even the dreariest afternoon.  My old standbys could do no wrong today, starting, of course, with the mighty TLS, which this time around had as many quotable little bits as an episode of Deadwood. In Maren Meinhardt's wonderfully clear-headed review of the controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which does more justice to the book in four paragraphs than most reviewers have managed to do in four or fourteen pages, she sums things up nicely:

Behind the posturing and special effects, the tenets underlying Chua's position are surprisingly sensible and relatively tame: most things that are worth doing need application and tend to become enjoyable once once one gets good at them; it is the job of parents to help their children get to that point.

I haven't yet managed to understand the outrage and commentary this book has produced, but then, my own tenets of parenting went out of fashion 400 years ago; practically every day, I see children launch themselves into utterly abominable public behavior, and they do it in the very consciously calculated certainty that their parents will not under any circumstances simply physically force them to mind their manners. Instead, such spoiled brats get to indulge themselves, scornful of the fact that the worst their parents will do is try to talk to them, to reason them out of their merchandise-destroying tantrum. "Amethyst," as I heard one over-pronouncing young mother say during one such tantrum, "remember what we discussed about social discourse?"

Elsewhere in this issue, P. J. Carnehan turns in a meaty review of a new art exhibit called "Georgian Faces" and wins this week's prize for Best Opening Line in a Review:

It's good to know that, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the defense of Dorset against the prospect of invasion was in the hands of well-dressed men.

But then, the TLS has always been a showcase for linguistic pith - most often at the expense of the poor authors whose works fail to impress. It's true that Edmund Gordon over-praises Philip Hensher's merely good novel King of the Badgers (his follow-up to his genuinely great The Northern Clemency), but oh, the sweet compensation found in Matthew Adams' demolition of David Baddiel's The Death of Eli Gold! I haven't read Baddiel's book myself, which is about four narrators recalling the life of the title character, but after the working-over Adams gives it, I'd be happy to buy the author a consoling drink:

Ascribing to each character a distinct narrative voice, the novel attempts to offer a picture of their psychological and emotional development as they adjust to the great novelist's passing. It is a potentially effective idea, but Baddiel's frivolous approach to language and characterization, combine with his evident disregard for the reader, means that that potential is never recognized.

... The novel is sore with afflictions of this kind. To a different kind of enterprise, they might not have been so comprehensively damaging. But The Death of Eli Gold is a long, static, ostensibly reflective work, and as such it is almost totally dependent on precision, weight, and authenticity of voice. It has none of these qualities ...

Hee.

One magazine-reading need my beloved book reviews don't fill is my foolishly persistent need for short fiction (well, almost never - the London Review of Books can keep running Alan Bennett's marvellous novellas forever, as far as I'm concerned) - 'foolish' because I'm so often disappointed you'd think I'd have stopped voluntarily long ago. Granted, writing a good short story is devilishly difficult, so I should keep my expectations low. But Penny Press days like today inflate those expectations - I found not one but two excellent stories. The first, "Twin Forks" by Daniel Woodrell, is in the latest Esquire - it's about a man named Morrow who buys a camp ground and general store out West hoping to escape some of the demons he left behind in Nebraska; it's got some very effective imaginings of loss and pain that a very different main character might have called a mid-life crisis, and the central scene, in which Morrow (with a little backstage help from his shop assistant Royce) confronts two machete-wielding drug addicts who pull up in front of his store in a beat-up car with two women in the back seat:

The women climbed from the beater and stood beside it, the elder subdued and expectant of the worst, the younger dark and expressionless, staring at Morrow. He looked back and could not believe how pretty her eyes were - what color is that? - then couldn't believe he'd noticed. He abruptly fired into the air while yet lost in her eyes and presence, said, "One more step."

The men halted at the sound, looked at each other, laughed till they bent in the middle and had to lean together. The machetes fell to the ground. The driver turned to the staring girl, "Toss me the keys to the trunk."

Royce said, "Don't let them open that trunk. You won't want that."

Woodrell is unknown to me, but the bio-note in Esquire indicates his a fairly seasoned writer, which might help to explain how effective most of "Twin Forks" is - although when it comes to short stories, I've seen many, many seasoned hands fall flat. My notorious case in point would be Alice Munro, who has never written a single well-done short story despite having spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but trying. So imagine my surprise when I turned to her preferred venue, The New Yorker, and found - not a well-done Munro short story, of course (what were you thinking?), but an utterly fantastic tale written by a newcomer to the field. The writer's name is Ramona Ausubel, and the story is called "Atria," and if it's any indication of her talent, her forthcoming book of short stories is worth pre-ordering right now.

"Atria" stars teenager Hazel Whiting, an intelligent and quirkily introspective high school student with a dead father and a hapless mother ("Hazel and her father were never in the world together - by the time she entered, he had already closed the door behind him"). Hazel is a fairly dispassionate observer of the world around her, and when she loses her virginity to a convenience store clerk one afternoon, she does so with almost clinical detachment ("This is it?" she thought. "This is the whole entire thing?"). Shortly after, she's raped by a different man and becomes pregnant, although she refuses to believe she's carrying an actual human baby:

She thought of the men who could have created this. "How could you be a person?" she asked her growing baby. She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of that summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heating her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but it still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around, sniffing her cave. She did not know if this creature was here to help or to punish her.

The story is told in writing so confident and yet loose-limbed that I'm hard-pressed to think of a similar style - maybe early George Saunders, but there's an ease here that he has yet to achieve (and, to be fair, doesn't seem to want to). There's ample dramatic control as well - the final eight paragraphs of this story will have your heart in your throat, and the effect is entirely uncontrived, springing from Hazel's character itself. It was a thrill to read, and it'll be a thrill to add another young writer to my 'must read' list. Going from "Atria" to the next Munro aunt-a-thon will be a harsh thing.

And since today is the first of the month, there's another entry in the Penny Press I naturally want to mention - and since this post marks the 800th entry here at Stevereads, I'm allowing myself a little indulgence! The first of every month marks the appearance of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly, and since it's the best online literary and arts review there is, it not only qualifies as a part of the Penny Press but also stands implicit comparison with the best of its paper-and-staple brethren. I play a part in the creation of OLM every month, but this in no way cheapens my evaluation - I was a periodical reader long before I was any kind of periodical participant, and I'm well able to click on over to the latest issue of OLM on the first of the month and simply encounter it as a reader. It's true that I know the genesis of the pieces with an intimacy I don't have with other magazines (in this case, for instance, I know the title Jeff Eaton's fantastic review of Colonel Roosevelt had before it got the boring-ass snoozer of a title it currently sports - stuff like that), but knowing that kind of thing can't make the reading experience any better or worse, believe me.

So I'm indulging myself here at Post #800 by telling you this: Open Letters is a hell of a good read every month.

The secret, of course, is the strength of the writing - and I know this because the strength of the writing keeps me reading essays on subjects I'd otherwise immediately ignore. In this latest issue, for instance, one review deals with Teju Cole's novel Open City, which I found stilted, canned, and stomach-churningly egotistical. You'd think, therefore, that a review of it would hold no interest for me - but Andrew Martin's piece in the latest OLM is so urbane and allusive and chatty that I found myself reading along and happy, despite anything I might think about its subject:

The darkness and light that Cole describes seem to project themselves back onto the image of the solitary man in a flickering subway car, and forward onto the titles of Mahler’s final works. Moreover, the connections don’t feel forced. They are clearly the work of someone thinking—they are self-consciously essayistic in construction—but the prose is steady, driving. One keeps reading the book for these moments, and there are many of them.

And if I was initially sceptical about any review dealing with a junk writer like Cole, you can imagine what I initially thought about an entire feature on perfume. My first reaction was that a high-priced ephemeral vanity product like perfume didn't deserve even a glance from what is primarily still a literary review - I certainly wasn't willing to grant perfumery the status of an art. But I read Elisa Gabbert's "On the Scent" column avidly each time it appears, and I do so for her agile, confident prose:

An all-natural perfume would stick out like a sore thumb at the perfume counter in a department store, as they smell and behave in a fundamentally different way and lack ingredients found in the majority of commercial fragrances (such as synthetic musks, dihydromercenol, and Iso E Super); perhaps counterintuitively, it’s usually synthetic chemicals that make a contemporary perfume smell “fresh.”

Likewise I've been mostly uninterested in novelist Ahdaf Soueif's involvement with the recent political upheaval in Egypt, tempted to write it off as Norman Mailer-style opportunistic grandstanding - until I read Rohan Maitzen's exploration of Soueif's activism as seen through the prism of her novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love. In every piece she writes for OLM, Maitzen exhibits both a joy in meaningful complexity and an explicit faith in the power of literature - it can be an incredibly thought-provoking combination:

“I know there’s an awful lot I don’t know,” Isabel says to Amal. “That’s a start, isn’t it?” Against this epistemological humility, which enables exploration, discovery, and cooperation, run powerful countervailing certainties that, refusing empathy, instead license prejudice, inhumanity, and violence.

Soueif’s novels work against such certainties. Even the heartrending conclusion to The Map of Love is productive, because our mourning prompts us to ask why, to demand a better, more just, more hopeful resolution. Both novels also not only invoke but create their own version of the Mezzaterra: a literary common ground, an optimistic, if endangered, space well served by the novelist’s tools.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this kind of bait-and-switch occurs when a first-rate writer decides to review a book that's not mediocre (like Cole) but outright awful. This contrast is jarring enough when less talented reviewers do it (I myself, for instance, do it all the time) - when really talented people indulge themselves like this, the effect can be surreal. Perfect case-in-point: in the latest OLM, John Cotter (another of those 'Must Read' young novelists on my list) turns in a review of "Alta Ifland"'s 60-page collection of short stories called Death-in-a-Box. The booklet is flyblown garbage in its every pretentious sentence, but something in it caught Cotter's imagination and prompted a beguiling review that's several orders of magnitude more thoughtful and poetic than its subject:

Ifland’s spiky narration turns fables into essays and then into sermons, milking the efficacy of the forms she passes through; just as characters double and blend, so do forms. Not that all of this blending works all the time; generally speaking, these stories begin with strong premises and then escape themselves. Sometimes this is an uroboros (as in “Death-In-A-Box” where the premise with which we begin winds elegantly back on itself); sometimes these endings are fine disappearing acts (as in “Twin Sisters” when one character disappears into another); sometimes these escapes are just French exits, unsatisfying evasions (as in “Uncle Otto,” where a zany character piece decomposes into drunken paperwork).

And the list goes on, in every issue of Open Letters. Part of this is luck, no doubt (magazine editors dislike admitting it, of course, but luck plays a disconcerting role in whether or not a potential freelancer says 'yes, sure' - and whether or not that freelancer then delivers the goods), but a bigger part of it is hard work on the part of OLM's editors, who find, chase, shape, and polish these pieces every month. The process of that finding, chasing, shaping, and polishing is no different at OLM than it is at the TLS or The New Yorker, except in scale and number of available hands on deck, and the results of all that work were among the many Penny Press offerings that pleased me today - so I thought it deserved a mention right alongside the others. Credit where credit's due, and all that.

And for my next 800 entries? Six words: All Paul Marron - All The Time!

Gone for the Day!

Our book today is Gone for the Day, a collection of the columns Ned Smith did for the Pennsylvania Game News magazine from 1966 to 1969. As near as I can tell, the magazine included the book as a subscription gift one year and it became so popular they reprinted it several times - but still only for their subscribers. If this is true, those were lucky subscribers, and the original readers of these columns must have been luckier still, since there's nothing quite like the low-simmer enjoyable sense of possession that comes from finding a really good regular column and following it religiously (I guess the closest equivalent these days would be finding a really good blog and subscribing to it, but as with all things on the Internet, it just doesn't feel the same). The vagaries of magazine budget and space being what they are - and passion being, as always, unpredictable - you never know where you're likely to find such a column, and the ones that manage to stay very good for years at a stretch are rare. One thinks of Stephen Jay Gould's "This View of Life" column in Natural History, or Katherine Powers' A Reading Life that was lately and shamefully cut from the Boston Globe (and picked up, in a move so thick with ironies you can barely count them, by the Barnes & Noble Review). How I would have loved to be one of those readers catching Ned Smiths' "Gone for the Day" columns as they were originally appearing, always under their neat little banner (enviably double-talented, he did all his own illustrations):



Smith was a lifelong walker in woods and fields (and, thankfully for the rest of us, a "lifelong writer-downer"), tracking through wooded hills and mountains of Pennsylvania for most of his life, in all seasons and weathers, carrying a battered notebook and a camera and noting the comings and goings, the tracks and passages of the multitude of living creatures he encounters - or just misses encountering:

February 7: A rabbit that hangs out on the edge of a neighborhood woods left an easily read account of last night's activities inscribed in the snow. Near the fencerow he had bitten off a number of greenbriar vines and eaten large portions of each. The mark of where he had been sitting, and the vines bobbing as he nibbled, left an arc of gashes in the snow. The tendrils and formidable thorns had been neatly nipped off, and lay scattered about on the snow.

That quiet gift for detailed observation runs through this entire book - Gone for the Day easily accomplishes what all the best books of nature-writing do: it puts the reader right there in the woods (or swamps, or arctic wastes, or what have you) with our guide, seeing what he sees:

February 6 [the following year]: Red squirrels are natural-born clowns, and when they don't know they are being observed they are absolutely hilarious. This afternoon I watched the antics of three of them from a blind at the feeder. Where they came from, I don't know, but they exploded onto the scene like a troupe of vaudeville acrobats. It was impossible to be sure who was chasing whom as they streaked over fallen logs, up and down trees, and over the snow in blurry, intertwining circles. Occasionally they tangled, squealing and churring in real or simulated anger, then they broke apart, only to resume the dizzy chase.

(There's even a winning quality of innocence, as that last quote makes abundantly clear: as should be obvious to any less cheery observer, those squirrels weren't happily clowning around with each other right there on the doorstep of the breeding season - they were ruthlessly trying to bite each other's balls of and then rip each other's throats out)

Smith has that wonderful facility for disappearing, melting into the scenery so thoroughly that time and again he catches animals just being themselves, totally unaware that they're being watched. The animals almost always sense him eventually and then do their own disappearing acts, but before they do, we get many marvellous glimpses from the Pennsylvania woods and meadows and stream banks:

March 14 - A muskrat feeding on the roots of some unidentified weeds from the breast of our dam proved to be a surprisingly fastidious diner. Each time he dug up a root he carried it to the water three feet beneath him, where he carefully washed and ate it. Climbing back up the steep earthen breast he then dug up another and repeated the entire process. Not before he had laboriously washed and eaten half a dozen roots did he notice me sitting on the far bank observing his table manners. Without an upward glance he plunged off the bank and into the water like an overgrown frog.

And the book tries for more than such camera-glimpses - and it very often succeeds. Like most people who consciously make roaming around in nature a part of their days, Smith quickly came to appreciate and gently preach the restorative powers of spending time with animals in their world. Even after fifty years, Gone for the Day still breathes that restorative power - it's the next best thing to going out wandering yourself. It might prove a bit tough to find a copy, but I urge you to try: this is a nature book to keep and re-read for the rest of your life.

Comics! The passing of the Torch

Marvel's two flagship comics continue to deal with the aftershocks of the death of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, a couple of issues ago in "The Fantastic Four." Nobody this side of Aunt Petunia believes the Torch is really, permanently dead (since a revived and all-growed-up Bucky Barnes is now on the Avengers as Captain America, my old ironclad Marvel Comics rule "Nobody dies but Bucky" has now been amended to "Nobody dies, period"), but these long-arc storylines where a major character seems to be dead allows writers at Marvel and DC to pretend it was all true and put all the related characters through all the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving, kind of like Tom and Huck getting to watch their own funeral.

Such a gambit can be flubbed, of course - DC dropped the ball big-time twenty years ago with its "Death of Superman" arc, and then, not to be outdone, they dropped the ball again last year when Batman allegedly died. But Marvel tends to do it right, as was seen in their recent headline-grabbing "Death of Captain America" story. And the approach they're taking this time is low-key and entirely believable.

The stress is on family, and Dan Slott's writing captures something of the tone of that quite nicely. The current issue of "Spider-Man" (lamentably titled "Torch Song") features nothing more than Spider-Man going to the Baxter Building late at night to share the company of the remaining members of the Fantastic Four (we're treated to a neat little homage to Spidey's first visit to the team, when he's accidentally caught in a pneumatic intruder-tube). It's all very quiet and sad and real-seeming, just four old friends talking about a loved one who's died. Gruff Ben Grimm matter-of-factly tells Peter Parker that he's a member of the family, and Sue Richards seconds it. They're sitting in the kitchen talking - no super-villains erupt through the walls, no surprises explode in splash panels.

The timing is off a bit in terms of titles shipping to stores - readers already know Spider-Man will join the team - but that doesn't dull the enjoyment of the last bit, where Reed Richards reveals that Johnny left one last holographic video message for Peter Parker:

Pete? If you're hearing this, I'm sorry, pal. Sorry that I'm gone, 'cause ... well, I know how you feel when it comes to losing family. And that's what you are to me. Family. So ... if you're thinking of this as my last will and all ... I'm not leaving you my sports cars or stuff like that ... I'm leaving you the best thing I ever had ... my spot on this team. A place in this family. The best sister, two brothers, niece, and nephew a guy could ask for.

Slott hits all the right notes in these scenes (including the hokey-but-effective signature FF hand-pile), but for my money, the single best evocation of what this whole story means is Marcos Martin's wonderful, understated, incredibly sad cover illustration. The combination of elements - the Empire State Building, the old-style water tower, the '4' signal-flare that will never now mean what it once did, and a small-looking Spider-Man looking up at it - makes this the best Marvel cover I've seen this year.

On the Wings of a Bird!

Our book today is H.R.Sass' modest 1929 hit On the Wings of a Bird, which was reprinted a handful of times back in the days before paperbacks, when almost all a book's sales were generated the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth. This book started out as one essay and grew through that demand, mainly because Sass is so poetically winning about what he calls the 'enchanted kingdoms' that all those who walk in the wild world manage to find. His are in the Carolinas, mostly, in the cypress-shaded lagoons and hot-wind beaches with their seal-shadowed sand bars, although such enchanted kingdoms can exist virtually anywhere, as we saw with dear old Nauset Marsh.  "You cannot trace upon any map the frontiers of your enchanted kingdom," he tells us. "It is remote and yet near at hand; you were far from it five seconds ago - oh, ten thousand miles away - yet now, in the twinkling of an eye, you are in its very heart." Aided by minimalist, winsome sketches by Herman Palmer, he guides us.

As Sass readily admits, this is mostly a book about birds. They certainly haunt these pages right from the start:

Sitting on the piazza on cool evenings in late September, I hear the voices of the feathered hosts that I cannot see. In hundreds and thousands and, it may be, in hundreds of thousands, they are streaming over my head, up in the black infinity between earth and stars. The whole air is full of them; now here, now there, now elsewhere, there various voices call to me out of the darkness. Some of the sounds I know well - the guttural "quok" of the black-crowned night heron, the high-pitched "skeow" of the green heron, the metallic chirp of the ricebird that travels in company with the larger wayfarers in the gloom. Others are sounds that I have never heard at any other time - that probably I shall never hear except on these autumnal nights when the far-called armes of the migrating birds are fleeing southward before the intangible, irresistible might of approaching winter.

But this is no monograph: plenty of other creatures wander in and out of these pages - deer in the woods, foxes, rabbits, and the two apex predators that were once ubiquitous all along the low-lying Carolina coastland, alligators and sharks. Alligators feature in our author's memories most fondly:

I like alligators. I like to see them and hear them; the bellowing of a big bull dragon, by the way, is one of the most impressive sounds in the American woods, an eloquent reminder of those colorful early days when a man could scarcely sleep near one of the great swamps because of the unearthly chorus of the wild beasts.

Because Sass was an avid surf-fisherman, sharks aren't quite as welcome in his recollections:

When there are sharks about, the surf-fisherman, if he has any sense, is constrained to stick to the shallows. In the easy chair at home he will laugh to scorn the tales that are told of sharks that attacked anglers, but in the surf slues, with a tall black fin showing above the foam-flecked water, he is apt to regard those tales more seriously.

And whether he's talking about menaces or marvels, Sass strikes one note entirely in common with all other good nature-writers - because he loves the places where he has wandered, because he wants them to be there for future generations, he cares most about stewardship. He cites it as the central theme of his book:

The utmost that can be hoped for is that it may help in some small measure to bring nearer the day when man shall cease to be a destroyer and shall become instead the friend and protector of his lesser kinsmen - the guardian and preserver of that marvellous life of earth and air over which, in the course of long ages, he has achieved almost absolute power. If it can give even the slightest aid to that good cause, its faults may be forgiven.

Whatever faults On the Wings of a Bird may have can certainly be forgiven - this is a gently spellbinding book, long out of print. It's doubtful Sass would have liked the many changes to his beloved Carolina coast since he put down his pen. Reading and smiling over this book, I just have to hope he'd somehow find enchantment there even so.

Ring of Bright Water!

Our book today is Gavin Maxwell's immortal 1960 nature classic, Ring of Bright Water, the story of his life in the West Highlands of Scotland in a picturesque little house he calls Camusfearna in the book - and more than just the story of that life: of course, as millions of readers have discovered to their delight over years, it's the story of the friendships Maxwell forms with first one remarkable otter, Mijdil, and then a second, Edal. So memorable is the impression the book leaves of these two remarkable animals that the returning reader is surprised to find that Mij doesn't even appear until 80 pages have passed - you remember it as his book from first to last, but Maxwell actually sets the stage for many pages before his acquires his friend in Iraq and brings him half-way around the world to the cold lakes and waterfalls of Scotland. We get many beautiful descriptions of the majestic bleakness of that part of the world - a bleakness that's ultimately impossible to capture in words, although Maxwell comes closer to doing it than any other author I've ever read. Even when he's in haste to tell an unconnected story, his descriptions are wonderful:

It was a cloudy night with a freshening wind and a big moon that swam muzzily through black rags of vapour. By eleven o'clock it was blowing strong to gale from the south, and on the windward side of the islands there was a heavy sea beginning to pile up.

But the real story here is Mij the otter, who takes immediately to domestic life and displays an abundantly energetic affection for Maxwell from the start. The reader is given scene after scene of Mij wandering the lakeside and hills, fishing and exploring, and coming back faithfully each night to the warmth of the fireside. The gentle nature of his curiosity about everything around him certainly clashes with my own face-to-muzzle experience with otters, but the passion of Maxwell's account is irresistible, and as in the best books of this kind, he gradually learns to un-learn his previous, inevitably parochial conceptions of what love is. When Mij disappears for a day, Maxwell is frantic with worry, and it moves him to self-examination (as he puts it, writers are duty-bound to a certain visceral honesty):

I knew by that time that Mij meant more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance, that I should miss his physical presence more than theirs, and I was not ashamed of it. In the penultimate analysis, perhaps, I knew that Mij trusted me more utterly than did any of my own kind, and so supplied a need that we are slow to admit.

And when Mij finally leaves the book forever (after only a year with his human friend), the sense of desolation that fills the pages before the arrival of Edal is suffocating:

I missed Mij desperately, so much that it was a year before I could bring myself to go to Camusfearna again. I mourned for my fallen sparrow; he had filled that landscape so completely, had made so much his own every yard of the ring of bright water I loved, that it seemed, after he had gone from it, hollow and insufficient; for the first time all the familiar things in which I had taken joy appeared as a stage backcloth against which no player moved.

But these quotes, though often foremost in my mind, are in a way misleading: Ring of Bright Water isn't a sad book - it has sadness in it, yes, but no reader will frown when they remember it. It's full of joy and communication and nature gloriously described, and the two pudgy, opinionated, stubby-legged creatures who star in its pages give no end of delight, which Maxwell has captured perfectly throughout. This author's career has long been a puzzle to me - it's absolutely strewn with some of the most poorly-chosen writing projects imaginable. This book is his only real masterpiece, despite the fact that he had talent enough for six or seven books this good. But at least we have this gem of an account - like Maxwell in this book, we must, I suppose, be grateful for whatever pure marvels come our way, for however long.

Aunts, Taunts, and Old Haunts in the Penny Press!

The 17 March London Review of Books (fully enjoyable, like green eggs and ham, on a train or in the rain) is a typically diverse and involving issue of that typically wonderful publication. I've praised the LRB often enough here - In the Penny Press would be a poorer place indeed without it - as being a kind of necessary adjunct to the mighty Times Literary Supplement; I go to the TLS to breathe the pure mountain air of erudition, and to be blasted by that air, article after article, three times the number of articles in any given issue of the LRB.

In the London Review, the reviews are longer, fewer, and in some measures designed to be more accessible - no less intelligent and probing, but with a broader issue-base in mind, and no 4000-word discourses on the latest annotated historiography of late 17th century conversos memoranda. Don't get me wrong: the sheer, bristling brilliance of the TLS' bookishness is one of the wonders of the modern world, gloriously anachronistic in our age of mini-tweets (they'll have my subscription, paid faithfully every year, until the sun goes cold in the sky). But one also likes a slightly more street-level intellectual stimulation, and for that, nothing currently being published (with one possible exception!) beats the LRB.

This 17 March issue is a perfect case-in-point: 15 pieces (plus juicy extra bits, like poetry or short columns) covering as wide a spectrum of subjects as any reading public could want. Even the political stuff is so well-written I very often actually read it, when corresponding piece in The New Yorker get skipped so I can watch David Denby mud-sling semiotics all over the new Angelina Jolie car-chase. But the literary matter is what really shines. The TLS regularly prints the Introductions various authors have written to forthcoming new editions of classics, but those are finished things just showing up in print early - when something similar happens in the LRB, you get the impression more of a workshop than a shop window, and it's nice.

Take the fantastic "The Importance of Aunts" in this issue, by the great Colm Toibin (I'm sitting here trying to remember the last thing he wrote that I didn't like - needless to say, this is not a process that takes a long time, with most authors - and I'm stumped; perhaps I'll consult my own archives): I'm sure

[caption id="attachment_2535" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="the mighty elizabeth spriggs as aunt agatha"][/caption]

this piece was conceived, written, and commissioned elsewhere and for other purposes (is there an Oxford Book of Aunts coming out? If there isn't, there should be - I'd buy a copy), but it still has a convivial air about it that makes it invigorating reading. Toibin looks at the function of aunts in the 19th century novel - his readings don't take him as far as the 20th century and Bertie Wooster, so he doesn't deal with those twin titans of menace, Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha - and he throws off idea after fascinating idea about the pseudo-maternal role aunts play in the fiction of the time. As you'd expect from Toibin, there's a great deal here about Henry James, as when we're told that he "followed the serialisation of Daniel Deronda. He read the book carefully, disapproved of it, and then took what he needed from it." Hee.

His essay wanders around quite a bit, which is what should happen in a piece by an extremely well-read Irishman, and it says lots of really interesting things about the various ways aunts are employed to make things happen, as opposed to the rarer mothers in the period's fiction, whose function is (or would be, if they were around to exercise it) to stop things from happening. Some wag once summarized all British fiction with the single word "aunts," and reading Toibin's essay here almost makes you believe it - I wanted more from him on the subject, which is, curiously, just what you want your readers to be feeling when they finish a piece like this.

Of course, leaving the reader wanting more isn't always - or even usually - a good thing in other kinds of pieces. In straight-up book reviews, for instance, if your reader ends the review by saying "but what about THIS? Or THAT?" then you've done an incomplete job, allowed your personal fixations to block or cramp your review. If you yourself are a high-profile professional book reviewer reading these words right now (I know quite a few of you are regular readers of Stevereads - although unaccountably bashful!), you'll know the many and powerful temptations to let your review be blocked and cramped, to give your personal hobby-horses a little gambol in print. We've all done it, and in essence there's no shame in it (provided you're interesting, the sine qua non of all writing) - the key is to do justice to the book under review, regardless of whatever else you decide to spool on about.

Naturally, in the case of this LRB issue, I'm talking about David Haglund's piece on James Franco's Palo Alto. Because it isn't a piece on Palo Alto, Franco's debut short story collection, even though it's billed as that. Instead, it's a piece on Franco's fraught public persona, with a couple of distracted paragraphs on Palo Alto tacked on. Unless you've allowed your subscription to USWeekly to lapse and are thus Franco-starved, this piece will certainly leave you wanting more, since in the place of Haglund devoting any kind of serious attention to the collection of short stories, we get Haglund drizzling baffled condescension all over Franco's non-writing career. What little there is about Palo Alto is more sizzle than steak, with pat little bits of plate-spinning like this:

But Franco's irony regarding his fame shouldn't lead anyone to underestimate the remarkable earnestness of his artistic ambitions, whether he's able to realise them or not. Indeed, that earnestness may be an obstacle to their achievement, if Palo Alto is any indication.

It's not that I'm expecting reviewers to ignore the fact of Franco's celebrity when discussing his book; authorship is a legitimate component of writership, after all. And I'm not equating Palo Alto with Franco's beloved Turgenev, not by a long shot. But it's a serious book nonetheless, some of its stories written in innumerable drafts to get them just so, and many of its effects genuinely heartfelt. It deserves more than a couple of dismissive paragraphs; Haglund should have resisted his urge to digress at such length about Franco's acting antics, especially since under different circumstances I'd have loved to read his take on those antics. Reading this piece, all I kept thinking was how disappointing Franco himself would find it - not disappointed that the critic didn't like his book (any writer has to be ready for that), but disappointed at how badly distracted the critic let himself be.

Fortunately, focus was in ample supply elsewhere in the issue, including my favorite piece, the redoubtable Tom Shippey's magnificent review of Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome, her great, endlessly entertaining, and beautifully written entry in Penguin's ongoing History of Britain. Shippy wasn't as taken with the book as I was, but he certainly does it justice with a thorough reading - and in the process he crafts an essay that's enjoyable to read all by itself, the true mark of first-rate literary journalism. It's no easy thing to write a knowledgeable 2000-word piece on a historical subject and keep things interesting the whole time - most professional historians, for example, would be helplessly stymied by such an assignment (even though they regularly give such assignments to their students), but Shippey never disappoints (well, until he eventually does, at which point Stevereads will dutifully whack him for it). Here he is on the wealth of pre-Conquest England:

No wonder William the Conqueror thought that England was worth a serious gamble. The country, with its rich estates, centralised bureaucracy, effeciently run coinage and - something at last that Roman Britain didn't have - its hundreds of watermills (a new technology), looked as if it were going to skip the Middle Ages altogether and move on to a new level of prosperity. But it took a long time to get there...

He somewhat snidely mentions how "In every TV programme about Anglo-Saxon England someone is always wheeled on to say, in effect: 'Dark Ages? How can anyone call these the Dark Ages? Just look at the amazing jewellery/magnificent artwork/superb illumination' and then offers a sparklingly pithy correction:

Nails, pots, tiles, bronze and copper coins: it's the absence of useful low-cost items in bulk that make a Dark Age, and their loss is not compensated by the ability to manufacture elite bling.

Marvellous. Couldn't have put it better myself.

There was lots else in this issue of the LRB, as there is in virtually every issue - 'something for everybody' as the useful old tag-line goes. At the risk of sounding boosterish, I'll go ahead and urge you all: take the plunge for a year's subscription, and see if you don't cheerfully renew when that time is up.

Comics! Timber Wolf in the Legion!

In yesterday's stack of comics was "Legion of Super-Heroes" #11, written by the legendary Paul Levitz and drawn by someone (something?) called Daniel HDR. It's called "False Start," and it's one of the early chapters in what's promising to be an epic return of the Legion of Super-Villains (only a promise, at this point - DC could always decide to fire Levitz precipitously in mid-story, or else he himself could decide to get himself fired in mid-story), and as you can tell from the cover, the centerpiece of the issue is a fight between the solar-powered Sun Emperor and the super-feral Legionnaire Timber Wolf.

So: the sort of thing that'll be incomprehensible to outsiders and catnip to Legion fans, who've loved Timber Wolf since his original appearance forty years ago (he was doing the whole savage-good-guy-with-claws-who-heals-real-fast a long time before Wolverine showed up over at Marvel). The match is also drastically uneven on its face: Sun Emperor is a 'big' villain, and typically in Legion history 'big' villains are fought by many team mates acting in concert. When that doesn't happen - when a writer intentionally sends out a hero alone against a villain who outclasses him - it tends to bode ill for the hero (one thinks of Chemical King, the original Invisible Kid, the original Karate Kid), so when I saw that wonderful cover, I wondered if Levitz was going to start off this big Legion of Super-Villains story with first blood going to the bad guys.

The mis-match comes from the fact that Timber Wolf isn't a 'big' Legionnaire. He's one of those above-the-middle superheroes without whom no team can function and be interesting (over at Marvel, think of how the Vision held the Avengers together for so many issues), but he's never been a Legion heavy-hitter on the level of Mon-el or Ultra Boy or Element Lad. Timber Wolf his mid-range super strength and agility, and he's got a bad temper. None of that should prevent a villain like Sun Emperor from melting his eyes and ending the fight in about five seconds.

But Levitz is a canny writer (and here he's very ably assisted by the pencils of this mysterious Daniel HDR-bot - this is some very good artwork, and it shows every sign of becoming fan-favorite classic stuff in about five more years of steady pencilling), and Timber Wolf is too popular with Legion fanatics to simply kill - this issue has something else in mind: reclaiming the character a bit. Timber Wolf faces off against Sun Emperor in Japan and simply refuses to let the fact that he's getting char-broiled stop him from beating the stuffing out of his foe (who has, I belatedly realized as I was reading, only normal human strength underneath all those flames). Levitz' scripting always has a curiously enjoyable bare-bones quality about it - in his "Legion," the universe is a tough place where bad things happen, and the good guys are always understaffed and overcommitted - and he enjoys a little poking around inside his readers' preconceptions, as when he has a defiant Timber Wolf object when Sun Emperor calls him an "animal" (always a touchy spot with this particular Legionnaire). "I'm not an animal," he says, "I'm human" - but he says it while he's charging, fangs bared, wild-eyed, whole head on fire, playfully subverting the moment.

This issue isn't meant to be big shakes - we're still in classic Levitz-style 'prelude' issues as his big storyline gears up - but even so it has half a dozen sub-plots percolating along, so there's something for virtually every picky Legion fan, and a real treat at the center for Timber Wolf fans. And the rest of us (what can I say? It's tough to get excited about 'feral' characters when you were one for the first third of your life) can take pleasure in the feel of a big story playing out so confidently - and in the HDR-bot's really good artwork (especially the fun background characters, in time-honored Steve Rude fasion).

Fly Away Free!

Our book today is a slim little natural history title called Fly Away Free from 1981 by Joan Hewett, with some absolutely remarkable black-and-white photos by Richard Hewett. It's the story of a California veterinarian named Joel who loves to surf and who one day while out on the water finds a lone young pelican just idling there on the surface. Joel suspects something might be wrong, and his suspicions are confirmed when the bird makes no attempt to fly away from him.

Joel suspects the bird might be injured or disoriented somehow, so he brings it back to his animal hospital, names it Rusty (because his wings don't seem to work and so might be rusty), and sets in motion a quick but fascinating story of the animal world intersecting with the human world.

Rusty submits to the care Joel gives him - the feeding tube, the crate, the baths under a hose - with complete meekness. Reading the book, you can't avoid the impression - mistaken though it might well be - that Rusty knows he needs help and gratefully accepts it. Joel is certainly happy to offer it, although once Rusty starts to feel better and begins bossing around everybody at the animal hospital, the feeling is perhaps not shared equally by all. The hospital's cat, for instance, might not like being snapped at, and the hospital staff might not enjoy being squawked at (Hewett says the squawking wasn't very loud, pointing out that pelicans have very small voices).

In a few days Rusty is strong enough to go surfing with Joel, tethered to him by a leash. He clearly enjoys it as much as Joel does, and he grows very much stronger. He grows ready, as Joel knows despite not completely wanting to admit it. And eventually the day comes when they go to the beach without the tether and Joel releases Rusty into the free air. The vet stands on the beach watching while the bird flies away, and neither he nor anybody will ever know how Rusty himself thought of this weird, not entirely unenjoyable interlude in the human world.

The moral of the story? Sometimes the weird-looking bossy smelly ungainly creatures we find out in the world are only with us for a short time, regaining their strength, before they disappear back into the world again.

And sometimes they stay, perhaps because the world doesn't want them back.