Dukla's Polish cover art

Like most readers, I have my momentary fancies. I think it was in 2006 that I sought everything labeled magical realism, which, in my collegiate ineptitude, was relegated to Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, and Salman Rushdie. The Nabokov canon was its own phase. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald went together. Once upon a time it was Dennis Cooper, J. T. LeRoy, Hubert Selby Jr., and Chuck Palahniuk (don’t tell anyone). A reader isn’t that different from a normal person, really. Our passion may be different, but we’re subject to the same system of evolving tastes as anyone else. Even writers.

Readers who happen to be writers generally add another dimension to their infatuations. It shows up in their writing, in those they emulate and echo. Sometimes this is a conscious directive, but more often it’s something latent. Unfortunately for me, I keep a journal, and it serves as a record of my “theories” on literature.

I’m developing some ideas about narrative–or at least I’ve been thinking about narrative lately. There’s a part of me that finds the traditional narrative structure so artificial and unsatisfactory… I don’t know that I’m necessarily tired of artifice, as it does work for some pieces, but it’s just not very engaging for me right now.

That was November 11, 2011, at 3:50 p.m. Throughout last year I consumed fiction after fiction that skirted around what I’d deemed the traditional narrative–everything from Wittgenstein’s Mistress to Beckett’s trilogy to Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which might not even be fiction–and, as with all fancies, I’d warped my sensibility as writer and reader. The idea of an emotional narrative arc started to take shape in my head–something that moved quietly through these novels and worked itself out in the dark parts of your brain. I think of it now like music. It’s something that takes place whether you understand it or not, and by the time you reach the final pages of The Unnamable, despite drifting through the narrator’s consciousness, it’s like you’ve swallowed too much cold milk. This, to me, was something new, and something worth pursuing.

Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk

Even though I’m struggling with my own limitations, I’m still enamored with this idea, which is why I fell in love with Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla, recently published by the always exciting Dalkey Archive. Originally published to much acclaim in 1997, this is the novel’s first translation into English, and it hurts to know we’ve had to wait fourteen years to read this. Duklais every artifice-fearing reader’s dream.

“For a long time now it’s seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature. Actions interest me to a much lesser degree.” This is the unnamed narrator’s confession, not far into the tri-part novella that comprises the bulk of this volume. “There’ll be no plot,” he warns us in the opening “essay,” with its “promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of the day.” In this way, Dukla has already canceled out our instinctual expectations as readers. Even now, I’m not sure whether to call it fiction, travelogue, memoir, essay, philosophy, or prose poetry. In truth it would disappoint me if I could. What matters is everything that’s here–the textures, the absence and presence of light, the summer’s heat and the silence of snow. The novel itself is an experience, and it wants you to be as open to its touch as possible.

Dukla is a real place–a small town and summer resort in Poland. Dukla is a series of glances at Dukla, all viewed through different lights and lenses. The novella at the heart of the book ties itself to a single, definable narrator and his repeated visits to the area, from his erotic awakening as a thirteen year old boy to his travels as an adult. “It’s a strange thing,” he says, “that I don’t recall any of my thoughts or feelings from that time. I don’t remember any of the things that actually were dearest to me, so I have to imagine them to myself.” These imaginings are delicately observed, painful reconstructions of life itself, drawn in a prose style so acute, so organic, and so affecting it’s easy to forget the novel is not native to English (this book is, needless to say, a triumph of translation). He takes what’s visible–what’s allowed by light–and deduces from it the logical conclusions any human being would deduce. In this way, fiction is inevitable. Fiction is the truth derived from memory or actuality–the visible world. What’s startling, then, is when Stasiuk takes away the light.

When night falls, the world vanishes. “Without the world, without the variety of forms all around, a person is naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected… The primal matter of the dark enters the veins and circulates like blood.” Here, in a novel admitting that “the imagination is powerless,” is the denial of that admission. In this sense, Dukla itself is a contradiction. With nothing left to see, the mind reaches inward and creates its own reality, or the basis of fiction. Dukla is not a novel about light at all, but a novel about darkness.

In the darkness is our imagination. While the absence of light eradicates the physical world–the landscape, the animals burrowed in the snow, even your own hand in front of your face–the imagination reaches out into its limitlessness and recreates what was lost. This, Stasiuk admits, is the closest we’ll come to eternity. Even after those landscapes and animals and all of humanity have passed from the earth, in the dark anything is possible. Dukla reminds us to get lost, now and then, in that darkness.

A preview of Dry Spell's front cover.

Writer and artist Ken Krekeler’s second graphic novel (read our interview about his first) begins by reaching a seemingly friendly hand to the reader. It’s easy to identify with protagonist Tom Ferris when we first meet him. We recognize the resigned look in his eyes, his middle class ennui. We care because this specimen of haunted mundanity could so easily be us.

We even laugh a little bit when he says that squeaky clean good guy Apollo “bugs” him. In Tom’s world, superheroes are part of everyday life. Like his namesake, Apollo perches atop this particular pantheon and is worshipped as a god.

So we take the hand offered us, perhaps expecting an uplifting story about a man overcoming the personal and creative dry spell implied in the title. But we don’t see the darkness ahead. We don’t expect the landmines hidden along the road.

“Once I was an artist,” Tom narrates. “I had talent. … But no one understood me. No one understood, and so I was asked to stop.” Dry Spell is the story of a man who has forgotten himself, who has willfully repressed what he is by imprisoning it in some cobwebbed corner of his mind.

We want Tom to unchain himself, or so we think. It’s only when the shackles begin to loosen that we realize, to our horror, that a monster is being unleashed.

Tom is indeed an artist, but his medium is death. We discover that he was once the Black Baron, one of the most sadistic villains in recent memory.

Krekeler paces the story so that the monster inside seems seep out slowly, at first. There’s a creepy encounter with a girl in an alleyway, then a sex scene tinged with sadomasochism. But it’s not until the initial murder of an innocent that the Black Baron seems to truly awaken. After this point, Krekeler no longer waits for us to settle into one level of discomfort before introducing a new one.

Preview of one of the inside pages.

It’s during this fever pitch that the scales between liking and loathing this story may tip for some readers. It’s where it tipped for me. Full disclosure: I am an editor of Dry Spelland I disliked it at first. I knew it wasn’t because of the writing, which was sharp, but because I had let it push the exact buttons Ken Krekeler had intended to push.

This is not a story that cares if you like it. It’s a story that wants to make you recoil inside, and, in so doing, examine the very things that repel you.

Dry Spell is, above all, a tale of discomfort. There is no moral center to hold on to, besides the somewhat wan mantra, “Be yourself.” In the last scene, even good and evil are revealed to be empty concepts.

Those looking for easy resolutions will not find it in Dry Spell. There is no punishment for the bad guy or ultimate triumphs for the good. We’re only left with a squirming feeling in our belly at the end of this journey, doubting if good and evil even exist, and wondering at the savage potential within.

Learn more about Dry Spell at its website or Facebook page.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
Sribner

Show, don’t tell. If you are a writer, you have heard this. If you haven’t, it’s time to emerge from whatever basement you haven’t left since becoming one. At its heart, the idea stems from imagery, in the loosest sense of the term. The writer gives the reader the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and the reader is then expected to reach the same conclusions as the writer. It’s agonizing, listening to writers explain their ideas. This little dictum, traced back through decades of writing workshops, books on craft, and lecture halls, is the first thing a young impressionable and let’s be honest fawn-like writer will hear when he announces his aspiration to make a dent in the literary world. What’s bizarre, of course, is that in the realm of books on writing—you could call them manuals on craft—this advice is altogether ignored.

Stephen King is one of those writers self-proclaimed literary authors avoid reading. We perceive his books as entertainment rather than art, having long forgotten that art can entertain. He’s all about story—putting characters in tough situations and seeing how they react. He must be doing something right, because as of this moment, King has written 49 novels. Those novels, according to a BBC report, have sold more than 350 million copies. According to Forbes, King made $34 million between June 2009 and June 2010, making him the third highest paid author in the world, behind James Patterson and Stephanie Meyer. The literary sect—we scoff at money. Anyone can sell books, but, as we all know, writing is about art, not sales. Unfortunately, we had nothing to say when King, in 2003, was granted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

Much to our chagrin, Stephen King is a good writer. You can’t get around it.

What can we learn from him? From a man who generally writes horror, realist science fiction, fantasy, and books that are straight out creepy, we wouldn’t think it could be much. But that’s the astonishing thing about him: he’s an extraordinary teacher. When it came out in 2000, King’s On Writing was greeted with rather unfavorable reviews in the mainstream media, even prompting a New York Times Magazine article called, “What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?” “Nothing can disguise the fact,” said Gary Kirst of Salon, “that nearly all of [this book] is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times before.” The truth is that we have heard it before, but that’s not what’s so remarkable about On Writing. The truth is that we haven’t been shown it before.

King’s book is full of straight advice. “If you want to be a writer,” he says, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” On adverbs: “The adverb is not your friend.” On the passive voice: “[it makes] me want to scream.” “The paragraph,” he says, “not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.” Of course a writer couldn’t put together a book like this without that basic advice. On Writing is meant for writers of all skill levels, those just starting to write or ten years at their desks. What separates this book from others like it, however, lies in its subtitle: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

The first 100 pages of King’s book is a section called “C.V.” Here the book reads like a memoir. “[My friend] and I like just about any horror movie,” he tells us, recounting his days as a pre-adolescent and giving a little insight into his taste. When a hideous, nun-like faculty member asks him why he wants to write “junk like this in the first place,” King remembers:

I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.

Here’s a book where an extraordinarily successful writer shows his audience how he became a writer. He recounts his years slaving away over a beat up typewriter in his childhood bedroom, pinning rejection letter after rejection letter to a spike above his desk. After his marriage, we’re shown a young couple struggling to pay the bills and raise two children. Meanwhile, King is tucked away in the laundry room, his typewriter on his lap, writing the first draft of Carrie. We’re excited for King when Carrie is accepted for publication, despite the $2,500 advance. “I didn’t know that [it was a small advance],” he tells us. “I had no literary agent to know it for me.” Then King’s life changes forever. Carrie goes to a paperback publisher for $400,000, half of which, according to King’s contract, is his. From there, we learn that writing, despite our perceptions, doesn’t get any easier. By the time we get to the later sections of the book—“What Writing Is”, “Toolbox”, “On Writing”, “On Living”—we trust King to talk to us about the thing we love most. That’s when he reveals his stance on adverbs and the passive voice. That’s when he tells us that “Plot is… the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Stories, he says, “are found things, like fossils in the ground… The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” King’s story is a fossil all on its own—a writer who is just as passionate about his work as our most literary authors, only trying to brush the dirt away from the bone. He shows us that fossil, and the result is an inspirational, thrilling book for any writer, one that makes writing seem—though exceedingly difficult—very possible. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t soliloquize. He gives us the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and we make of them what we will.

Room
by Emma Donoghue
Back Bay Books, $14.99

Jack’s fifth birthday is an extraordinary one. Being five comes with superpowers, and he gets to choose what to wear and when to have his presents. Five is halfway to ten. “‘When I’m ten I’ll be growed up,’” he tells his Ma. Jack is an outgoing boy with lots of friends—Dora the Explorer, who he knows through TV; Meltedy Spoon, the result of a stove accident, who’s his favorite “because he’s not the same”; Duvet, who protects them from the cold when Old Nick turns down the heat; Baby Jesus and John the Baptist, who play in a drawing above the bed; Spider, who has made a web “between Table’s leg and her flat”; Skylight; Door; Bed; and Wardrobe, where he hides when Old Nick visits after Watch tells them it’s nine o’clock, counting how many times the bed creaks. All Jack’s friends—and many more—are a part of Room, the eleven by eleven foot space where Jack has lived his entire life. He was born in Room, according to Ma: “‘First thing in the morning, you slid out onto the rug with your eyes wide open.’” Rug confirms this story: “I look down at Rug with her red and brown and black all zigging around each other. There’s the stain I spilled by mistake getting born.” To Jack, everything he watches on TV is part of Outside—a made up world that’s there for his entertainment. Then, not long after his fifth birthday, Ma tells him the truth. “‘What we see on TV is… it’s pictures of real things.’”

“That’s the most astonishing thing I ever heard,” Jack says.

It is astonishing, and so is Ma’s process of “unlying”: “‘What I’m doing is the opposite of lying,’” she tells him as she recounts her own history—that she too had a mother, that she was a child, in Outside. Old Nick stole her, she says, and put her in this cell.

“That’s ridiculous, Ma was never in Outside.”

From here on out we understand that Emma Donoghue’s Room comes to us right at the moment when Ma can no longer bear her confinement. “‘We have to get out of here,’” she says. “‘And we have to do it all by ourselves.’” But Jack doesn’t want to leave, having known no other life than Room. From Jack’s perspective we get the sweet side of hell, the joy of having a mother all to ourselves with no chance of separation—a motherhood that seems infinite in its reach in the compressed world they share. At the same time, Jack shows us his mother as she grows desperate, as she seems less and less like Ma and more like a young woman who hasn’t left Room in eight years—a woman abducted on her way to school when she was nineteen, the so-called “best years of her life” gone. Jack doesn’t want to share Ma with anyone, and this is the heart of the novel, along with all its torment unleashed upon the reader.

Room is one of those books that carries cardiac surprises. It’s a novel that makes a reader’s heart scream for mercy as Jack puts himself in harm’s way, if for no other reason than his love for his mother. But that’s not its most arresting moment. When we learn the terrible truth of the novel—what it reveals, brutally, about motherhood—we’re left drained of adrenaline and shaking. Here we learn that motherhood does have its limits. In truth that’s the thing about motherhood—it is finite. We all learn it somewhere between preschool and kindergarten—sometimes later—but in these circumstances, when Jack learns it, it’s never been more harrowing. With an unflinching voice and a startling power of observation, Jack is our guide to a world that seems beyond us, that seems impossible and malicious, but is in fact the same as any relationship between mother and child, nothing more than love to keep us together until love itself is not enough.

***
Photo by tachyondecay

Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling debut novel hardly needs the help of a small webzine to sings its praises, but that’s not going to stop us from giving it some much deserved attention. Because the most adept of readers loves nothing more than to turn the pages; because we don’t let things like prose style or plausibility creep into our consciousness; because there’s nothing inherently complex about racial discrimination; because one prefers caricatures to characters, The Help is the most remarkable novel we’ve come across in years.

To call a novel a page-turner is to suggest that one can’t or doesn’t want to put it down. This is definitely the case with Stockett’s debut. It’s hard not to jump ahead, to let your eyes skip down a paragraph or two, just to get through it that much faster. One’s almost tempted to skip pages, it’s so exciting. Does it work out for Abilene and Minny and the white savior Miss Skeeter? Or is Stockett the kind of writer who lets the weight of the world crush these impossibly kind, conscious, dedicated women—women who have so few faults that it’s hard to even think of them as human beings? Will the soulless, vicious, inhuman-in-her-own-way Miss Hilly triumph and ruin the lives of everyone in her path (because that’s clearly what motivates all racist individuals)? There’s just no way to see it coming. The pages—you can almost hear them fluttering on airplanes and in waiting rooms.

One of the novels greatest successes is Stockett’s stylistic choice to highlight the drudgery and ignorance of 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi with intentionally dull prose. It’s remarkable, her eye for a forgettable sentence. “I listened wide-eyed, stupid,” Miss Skeeter says of her childhood maid. “Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would’ve been Constantine’s voice singing.” When looking at a bloodstain on the bathroom floor, Minny remarks that “A chill blows through the room, like a ghost passing by.” Miss Skeeter, a guest in Abilene’s house, notices that “she stands a little taller in her own house,” after which Abilene looks at her “expectantly.” As if the racial differences aren’t quite highlighted enough, Miss Skeeter thinks to herself, “I wish I hadn’t worn such an expensive-looking dress.” Never before has an author used the ellipsis to such dramatic effect: “I wonder at how frail and inconsequential my mother has become,” Skeeter says. “She used to fill up a room by just breathing and now there seems to be… less of her.” Splendid, that dramatic pause, almost as though it were actually intended to fill us with awe at such insipid wit. That’s the real beauty of this book—it’s so poorly written that it’s almost metatextual, some kind of commentary on the literary qualities of the three women in the book. Perhaps Stockett, who illuminates Skeeter’s loneliness with a hilarious passage about an air conditioner*, is working toward something much darker here. Perhaps there is no literary hope for these three women as they work on their book. Perhaps all of us, as writers, are doomed to the confines of literary tradition, nothing left to explore and all creative outlets closed off. Stockett, it would seem, is a brilliant nihilist.

It’s this nihilism that helps us understand the rest of the book. In its pages, there is a clear divide between good and evil, between right and wrong, and its utter lack of complexity starts to nag at the reader. Then it clicks. Stockett, with her cartoonish vision of 1960s Jackson, is actually working to reveal how implausible it is to think there’s anything as possible as a quick fix, like the aforementioned clear divide. Racism, of course, is a very nuanced and byzantine topic with thousands of years of history. By portraying its complete opposite—a perfect little black and white world with such clean-cut morality—Stockett is aiding in our understanding of that complexity. We are shown a lifeless artifice, an exaggeration in its own way morbid and disrespectful, and on every page it reminds us of the truly devastating thing about racism: that it simply isn’t as simple as she makes it out to be. Stockett, without a doubt, understands the art of subtlety.

So where does that leave us, as readers? In her great nihilistic vision Stockett may one day join the ranks of our most accomplished writers, alongside Melville and Beckett. For that reason, let us hope that she doesn’t succumb to the populist ideals, let us hope that her prose continues down its path of subversive banality, that her characters go on living as lifeless stand-ins for themes, that her plots are so driven by irony that on the surface they appear as nothing more than beach reading, than novels that will be forgotten in five years. “The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open,” Abilene says as she goes off to start her new life at the book’s close. So too are this reader’s eyes, awake and aware of all the brilliant work to come.

***
* “For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they’ve fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to “3” again it or will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unbutton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to “3.” Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.”

In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think but encourages to “exercise some control over how and what we think.” We have the ability to experience the hellish monotony of daily life as “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” “Please,” he added, “don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice.” In truth the most startling thing about Wallace’s lecture was its lack of lecturing, even when pleading for us to be compassionate. We believed that Wallace couldn’t lecture or moralize. He was a novelist, after all, and isn’t it the novelist’s task to show us the world as it is rather than the world as it should be?

The Pale King—Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel published by Little, Brown last month—has gone on to receive what to any living author would be nerve-damaging attention, and the consensus is unanimous. The novel, says Laura Miller of Salon, “seems intended to plumb the meaning of boredom, a phenomenon usually defined by its meaninglessness.” In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban informs us that Wallace’s “unresolved ambition to find meaning in ordinary, adult lives, to explore boredom and frustration as a necessary and interesting human condition, has great vitality in these pages.” Hopelessly scarce are the reviews that don’t mention the pervasive and almost prayer-like presence of boredom and routine. In the book—itself an undeniable extension of the philosophy unpacked in his Kenyon speech—Wallace’s characters become so entrenched in the tedium of their jobs at the IRS Regional Examination Center that their experiences border on revelation. Lane Dean Jr., at his Tingle table in an enormous room full of other examiners, becomes so bored that for the first time in his life he contemplates suicide, after which he begins to feel the presence of “phantoms”: “hallucinations that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom.” Dean’s particular phantom launches into an etymological discussion of the word “boredom,” concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.” Here boredom is a transformative process—a moment of awareness. Here our lives are enriched by a strange suffering and self-sacrifice. Coupled with the commencement speech, even the most brilliant of novelists in Wallace’s position would find himself powerless to wash the philosophy from his hands.

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.” This is of course explored much further in The Pale King. Framed within the tax metaphor (and it is a rich, wonderful metaphor), the examiner Chris Fogle reminds us of “basic economic law”: “In taxation, the result is that the taxpayer will always do whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize his taxes. This is simple human nature.” Elsewhere, recruit David Cusk is concentrating all his energy on trying to prevent an attack of “shattering public sweats.” Ultimately, Cusk realizes that “the hot spotlight he felt on him did not exist,” after which he feels “solid and confident.” Again that strange morality, as though there’s a lesson to be learned or some improvement to be made, trading a solipsistic view for an awareness beyond oneself.

Much has been said about the morality of novels. Lovers of literature, we recoil at the agonizing simplicity of the word: morality. There’s nothing complex about it—nothing nuanced or emblematic of every human heart’s dichotomies. Morals are dangerously equated with messages, and as Nadine Gordimer reminded us in a November interview with The Guardian, “If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It’s fatal for a fiction writer.” Wallace, Raban states in his review, “loved ambiguity and teasing irony, but when it came to morals he had a deep fundamentalist streak in his makeup, a disconcertingly innocent thirst for the ‘capital-T Truth.’” Since his death in 2008 Wallace has become one of America’s most beloved and respected contemporary authors. The number of books, articles, and even websites dedicated to “Wallace studies” grows tirelessly larger every day. His popularity is beyond doubt and so too is the importance that readers place on his work. Yet there’s something resonant in Raban’s statement that Wallace is some kind of moral fundamentalist. The thematic undercurrents of The Pale King are so simplistic that it’s almost wholesome—and why does this terrify those of us who pride ourselves on “getting” great works of literature? It’s almost as if we renounced morals long ago as something both utopian and fantastic in the way of fairytales.

Considering our nation’s love for Wallace there is an important question that we must ask ourselves: What does it mean for us to have an affinity for a moral novelist? Do the people of the United States have some lesson to be learned from his fiction? Are we, even in our rebellious godless and let’s say nihilistic adolescence as a culture, still yearning for meaning in our lives? Do we, as the unnamed character in The Pale King states, have “profound responsibilities?” In the first of the Federalist Papers (mentioned multiple times in this novel), Alexander Hamilton informs us of our moment to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” In Wallace’s view, that reflection and choice was the key to living a successful life not only on a personal level but a societal level, insisting that choosing to consider the lives of others—the world beyond oneself—would lead us all to live more compassionate lives. The same character goes on to say that “We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.” If The Pale King, alongside the Kenyon speech, was Wallace’s plea to take that morality back from the automated bureaucracy that governs us, how can our most passionate and high-minded readers stay so hopelessly in love with his work, no matter how repellant the term “moral novelist” sounds to us? In its abstract idea there’s nothing literary about asking people to be selfless, but Wallace has made it literary. Is that what it ultimately took—for it to be literary? Do we as complex and even jaded readers need to encounter our moral lessons in something overwhelming like Wallace’s fiction? Did it really take a byzantine, monolithic, and even maximalist novel for us to think about what it means to have empathy for one another? On the precipice of our nation’s financial bankruptcy, do we need characters like Chris Fogle to instill in us a hunger for faith in altruism—for a choice to think beyond the self and perhaps stop doing everything we can to minimize our individual tax contributions? Amongst all this dispassion and almost crippling apathy, is it possible for us to choose to think about how legislation affects the other Americans around us? Was Wallace foolishly optimistic or exceptionally humanistic? Are morals still a myth?

Wallace, to the chagrin of his admirers, is not here to defend any vicious accusations of morality, nor answer any philosophical questions. All we have left is his work, the value of which depends entirely on how we choose to view it.

In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes proposes his theory on the origin of love. Man, he explains, was not always divided into two sexes. In the beginning we had four legs, four arms, and two sets of eyes, and we rolled about on the surface of the earth perfectly happy. Knowing nothing of suffering, we soon grew restless and over-confident. It wasn’t long before we made an attack on the gods themselves. In response, Zeus cut us in two “as you might divide an egg with a hair” and we were left two halves of one perfect being, constantly in search of our other half.

Since then love has been our obsession. Why do we fall in love? Why does love bring so much pain? What can we do to prevent love from destroying us? Unfortunately, as Anne Carson outlines in her philosphical essay, Eros the Bittersweet, we will never understand it. It is something beyond us—something just within our fingertips but always taking that one extra step to elude us. In the end we begin to realize that this is perhaps for the best—that it is maybe more fortunate than we realize. In terms of desire, the wanter and the wanted never come together. “To catch beauty,” Carson explains in the preface:

would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Eros is a stunning book. Carson delves through literatures both ancient and modern, both literary and philosophical, to underscore what she believes to be the primary characteristic of desire: its contradictory impossibility. The lyric poet Sappho, she explains, summed it up in one word: γλυκόπικρος, or “sweetbitter”—an experience of simultaneous pleasure and pain. From there, Carson leaves no facet of love left unexamined, unpacking ancient theories of desire with crisp and cutting translations, an overwhelming knowledge of classical literature, and an insatiable thirst to define what love means to us. The result is an endlessly fascinating treatise that feels very much like the act of falling in love itself.

“The word eros,” Carson states, “denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have.” Who can dispute this? Going back to Aristophanes’ origin of love, she says of the lover, “The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.” Again—we are searching for that other half. When we find what we seek, all curiosity—all desire—ceases, and there’s nothing left for us to do. The act of love in the ancient world was an act of pursuit. “Desire moves,” Carson says. “Love ‘puts the heart in my chest on wings.’” In this sense, we understand that something within us changes when we fall in love. We go through a transformation, and this is why love is so irrefutably important.

Carson broadens the sense of desire beyond sexuality: “A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover’s soul. He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before.” And so desire—the pursuit of something adored—extends to the process of coming to know, or reaching out for knowledge. Knowledge is desirable. Our attitude toward love is that if we could only have our beloved—if we could only come to control him or her—we would be at peace. The same is true with knowledge: we are always on the cusp of understanding but we never quite understand. Before desire—and before knowledge—the self is whole, complete, and safe from external force. The self is invulnerable. When struck by desire, by the god Eros—the “limb-loosener,” of “sweet tears” and “bitter honey”—our self is suddenly changed, and as Carson reminds us, “Change of self is loss of self.” The metaphors for falling in love “are metaphors of war, disease, and bodily dissolution.” With exquisite clarity Carson shows us just how brutal desire can be and before long we sympathize with these ancient poets, wanting nothing more than to shut ourselves up from love forever and live on invulnerable and apathetic. We are wary of change and wary of love.

Of course it cannot be that simple. In an extended examination of Plato’s Phaedrus, Carson reveals Sokrates’ position on the matter of love—a truly radical stance at the time. Love brings madness—that goes without saying—but Sokrates believed that “erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.” And what are wings but transformative elements—elements of motion? Without the placement of our soul on wings, how are we to move? Again: “Desire moves.” Things like falling in love and coming to know are maddening but necessary, are painful but key to our survival as human beings. This favored description of the poets and philosophers is central to our understanding of the importance of love, finding themselves “describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.” Love is a triangulation of now, then, and the space between—of lover, beloved, and the distance between them—of student, knowledge, and the potential journey of coming to know. Even if we never truly understand love, Carson helps us understand its necessity. Without it we would go nowhere.

My first exposure to comic books was in my paternal grandparent’s mobile home where my uncle John—my dad’s baby brother—still had a room. He also had hundreds of serial comic books jammed tight into the headboard of his narrow captain’s bed. When I visited, this would be my room, John being relegated to the couch. Most were of the superhero variety and of little interest to a seven year old girl. But every now and then, my random selection would reward an Archie or Casper story.

When I was a few years older, I would find Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics in the room of my mother’s youngest brother. Dave’s room was always smokey, and full of contraband. I learned early that comics somehow straddled the line between adult and kid lit and were, by and large, for boys.

It wasn’t until art school in the mid-nineties, that I was exposed to a greater variety of comics, zines, and graphic novels. They blurred the line between comics and journals, and some even had girl-centric story lines such as Dykes, Eightball and Love and Rockets. But until I read Maus by Art Spiegelman, comics were still just a vehicle for entertainment—an escape. Maus is the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Spielgelman’s father, Vladek, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It wasn’t the first nonfiction comic, but its popularity helped to broaden the readership and fanbase for such work.

by Greg Cook

In Syncopated: an Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays (Villard, 2009), editor Brendan Burford seeks to expand the dialogue that works like Maus have begun. Within this large-format collection, Burford has assembled an ambitious collection of comics-as-essay ranging from personal narrative, to biography, to literary journalism and more.

The biggest drawback to the collection is the overly pedantic title. Why Burford chose the word “picto-essay” over “comic” is a mystery. Brendan Burford is currently the Comics Editor for King Features Syndicate, which brings Beetle Bailey, Family Circus, Prince Valiant, and dozens more classic comic strips to daily papers all over the US. Perhaps the awkward wording was an attempt to separate these comics from those comics. There’s no faulting the accuracy of the term, but it makes this collection seem pretentious—which it is not. Rather it is primarily an attempt to tell 16 good stories, and perhaps secondarily an attempt to highlight an important comic sub-genre and its impact on the field of literary nonfiction.

by Brendan Burford

Lee Gutkind, in the introduction to The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 1 differentiates the genre from pure journalism in that, “Creative nonfiction writers tell stories, utilizing dialogue, description, characterization, point of view, while at the same time remaining true to the facts.” This is a useful definition to use when gauging the success of the comics in Syncopated.

Several selections stand out, notably the first piece, a memoir by Nick Bertozzi, about baling hay. The panels are small and snug on the page, mimicking the shape of hay bales even as they tell a story that ends up being about much more than just a farm.

by Paul Hoppe

“West Side Improvements,” is a tight journalism piece by Alex Holden about early graffiti artists in New York City. While “Coney Island Rumination” by Paul Hoppe presents more as sketchbook pages, eulogizing an urban landmark.

Other notables include Jim Campbell and Burford’s own story of Boris Rose, a live-recorded jazz aficionado, and Alex Longstreth’s tale of the Dvorak keyboard.

Two pieces succeed wordlessly with strong visuals. One, a meditation on light and shadows in a city park by Tricia Van den Burgh, the other on-site sketches of subway buskers by Victor Marchand Kerlow. While it is common to see a series of photographs as “essay,” it is encouraging to see Burford extending that idea to the frames or pages of a comic as well. Kerlow’s buskers vibrantly precede work being done today by Wendy MacNaughton, who captures small populations (Mission district bartenders, farmer’s market farmers) in watercolors and their own words.

by Nick Bertozzi

The difficult pieces seem to fall short in either graphics or story, but never both. “Father Figures” by Josh Neufeld seems to be missing a great deal of subtext in its series of polaroid-like snapshots of various men from his childhood. While Nate Powell’s compelling and rich graphics tell a harrowing story about  Tulsa race riots in 1921, but suffer from a rushed and jumbled narrative. But even these pieces can instruct the reader on what pitfalls exist for graphic essays.

Syncopated can be seen as the beginning of an important conversation about nonfiction comics. It could even work as a textbook for a critical class on the subject. More than just a “serious” comic book—this anthology speaks to the ongoing evolution of the essay. While it does suffer from variable levels of success, as anthologies often do, the majority of pieces are strong and represent different niches in the genre—from personal memoir to literary journalism.

(All frames courtesy of Brendan Burford and used by permission.)

For those unfamiliar with the world of José Saramago’s fiction, it’s a place where an entire city is stricken with an epidemic of blindness, where God and the Devil argue in front of Jesus over the savior’s fate, where the Iberian Peninsula suddenly breaks away from Europe and floats across the Atlantic. His books have routinely offered unique pleasures. With their paragraph-long sentences and their eschewing of traditional punctuation, they are labyrinthine fantasies that we never forget. His 2006 novel, Death with Interruptions, etches its own place in Saramago’s oeuvre. While outshined by works like Blindness and The History of the Siege of Lisbon, it still manages to leave any reader with that particular sense of awe we feel in the presence of any master.

“The following day, no one died.” In an unnamed European country, the first day of the new year is cause for both alarm and celebration. It is the first day in that country’s history that passes without a death. At first this is thought to be a fluke—a simple stroke of grace from whatever God governs up in the sky. Then another day goes without a death, and another. Citizens who by all accounts should be passing into the next life are holding on. The queen mother is constantly on the verge of death: “[She] neither improved nor deteriorated, she remained there in suspension, her frail body hovering on the very edge of life, threatening at any moment to tip over onto the other side, yet bound to this side by a tenuous thread to which, out of some strange caprice, death, because it could only have been death, continued to keep hold.” The citizens are ecstatic, having finally realized mankind’s oldest dream of overcoming mortality. They celebrate by displaying their nation’s flag on their doorsteps and in their windows. Months pass and the flags become faded and shredded by wind and weather. By this time the government has been pressured by the maphia (not the mafia) into paying exorbitant amounts of money to shuttle the nearly dead across the country’s borders where they can die and be buried on foreign soil. In all this tumult is death, sans a capital letter. Why has death, who may be more powerful than God, abandoned their country? What kind of game is death playing?

The book takes a turn when death makes her appearance. She is a frail, tiny skeleton covered in a shroud. She carries a scythe that is her only companion. She lives somewhere underground in a dark room filled with filing cabinets. When the terror of immortality becomes too much for mankind, death reveals her experiment to the public in what is essentially an “I told you so.” People are relieved to find out that death will take up her scythe and go back to work, with one exception. Death will no longer show up unexpectedly. From now on she will send a letter in a violet envelope one week prior to our preordained date of death: “a week in which to sort out affairs, make a will, pay their back taxes and say goodbye to their family and to their closest friends.” When death begins her experiment, we learn just how lonely she has become over the centuries. We learn that she is just as frail as the rest of us. We learn that she can fall in love with a mortal human being.

As a novel, Death with Interruptions suffers from its weak points. The first half recounts the country as it fails to accept its immortality, and the second half dramatically shifts into death’s personal affairs. In truth it feels like two novels. In addition, the love story comes too late for us to be engrossed in it. The only character we really get a glimpse of is death, and even that glimpse is eclipsed by Saramago himself, who may be too philosophical for his own good with aphoristic gems like “One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.” Yet that does not prevent his final novel from being a thoroughly enjoyable read. If anything, Death with Interruptions is a master’s reflection on our own shortcomings, but also our unique beauty. For so long we have feared mortality. We have trembled at the thought of death and her rusted scythe. Our lives go on empty and twisted as we wait for our day to come. Maybe we can learn from death—death who “knows everything about us, and that perhaps is why she’s sad.”

It’s one of those concepts that has driven men and women to compose treatises in verse, drink themselves comatose, start fights, and maybe even die young. Unfortunately we have nothing to show for it. There’s still no consensus on beauty—or Beauty, if you prefer—and despite the zeal of poet and linguist Robert Beard when we apply this lens to something as abstract as language our efforts are just as unlucky.

What is lucky, however, is that this negation does not prevent The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English from being an entertaining, chuckle-inducing, and all around charming book. Though rife with pretentious sentences and rather poorly edited, Beard’s passionate examination of these one hundred words is surprisingly fun—especially considering that the book is, at its most elemental, a dictionary.

Beard prefaces the book with two brief essays that outline his criteria for beauty. He grades words on their sound (music), their meanings (denotations and connotations), and the combination thereof: “The lexical beauty of such words arises more from the appropriateness of the relationship between their sounds and meanings than from either the sound or meaning in particular.” Whereas the music of words is concerned, Beard states that “Vowels tend to be lovelier because they are shaped by the vocal ‘pipes’ alone without obstructions.” The connotation here is that sounds made by the mouth are vulgar whereas those that originate from the throat are beautiful. As we read on it becomes clear that by “beautiful” Beard actually means “pleasing”: “Spirants like ([th], [dh], [f], and [v]) are also very soft sounds and soft is far more beautiful than hard.” What we desire in beauty is, apparently, that feeling of warmth, of serenity, of calm. We learn that Beard’s definition of beauty is in fact very mundane and vanilla. There is no sublime. There is no awe. It’s all about closing one’s eyes and letting oneself be rocked back to sleep by language.

When we move on to the list itself the book starts to develop its character. With the first word—“ailurophile”—we get a meditation on its meaning (“a cat-lover or, better yet, a fancier of cats”), brief praise on its ability to roll off the tongue, and a lengthy paragraph that traces the origin of the word. This formula sticks throughout the book. Each word receives four paragraphs of text, all on one page. An undisguised lover of language, Beard plays with each word there on the page, exalting its versatility or its specificity, delighting in its liquids and glides and fricatives (very rarely do we encounter any harsh stops), and bouncing through its history from English to French to Latin to Greek—all the way back to what Beard introduces as the Proto Indo-European root language that was spoken some 6,000 years ago. It’s rare that we get such an exuberant and adoring portrait of mere words and—bland as it is—Beard’s fervor for English is contagious. His list makes us want to create our own, judged by our own discriminating standards.

Our standards, of course, would all differ from one another. There are words on Beard’s list that we wouldn’t even think of including on our own, not to mention words we find beautiful that may repulse another. Where is “pale?” a reader may wonder. Where is “ochre” in this long list? In truth Beard’s book only reinforces conclusions we reached long ago—that beauty is entirely subjective, that what delights us is nothing more than our own preference. The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English is Robert Beard’s list and no other’s. Even so, we can’t fault him for his ecstatic love of our electric, multifaceted, and gorgeous language.

This and other titles by Robert Beard are available from Lexiteria Publishing.