In Contrary Laury A. Egan trains her unforgiving eye on some of the 21st Century’s worst features. She takes up toxic childrearing practices; the dicey work of maintaining relationships in the Queer spectrum; the haughty, insular views of the wealthy class; and, among others, the isolation and confusion of older citizens beginning to lose their mental acuity. Through it all she yolks her comprehensive understanding of people’s emotional journeys, and treats her characters and her readers with a therapist’s support and generosity. It’s a collection full of lovely, memorable pieces.
As in all good fiction, characters’ lives change: they move from one phase of their lives to the next, for better or for worse. There’s the teenager born to privilege who, after walking to a welcoming home in a very different neighborhood for his Thanksgiving dinner, returns home to grudgingly fulfill his holiday duties. He remains in his room long enough to rein in his disgust toward his father and his old-money pals so he can perform dutifully.
We also meet a widow late in her life who is not very comfortable attending a Christmas dinner under the threat of Covid. When she finds no one else is in a mask, she surreptitiously removes hers, but is horrified when everyone else at the party, who are all her age or thereabouts, interrupts their own conversation to take video hello’s from family in other states. Her isolation is complete when she decides to get her coat and leave early, to the angry glances and whispered recriminations of her fellow guests.
And, quite memorably, a young psychotherapist marches along a beach, fuming about a cowardly breakup being perpetrated by her mooching lover. Because of a note written in the sand, of all things, she meets an enigmatic character holed up on the beach who calls himself “Captain Roy.” This old gent draws her out about why she’s so angry, and says some miraculously on-point things, plumbing her emotional depths so quickly and with such exactitude that she is quite gobsmacked. The kinetic therapy he treats her with, and who he used to be before retirement, are simply wondrous, exciting, ineffable.
Egan concludes her collection with a two-act play, “Duet.” This is a new form for her, but she handles it with aplomb. The subject matter and theme are right in her wheelhouse: generous, caring therapists who extend a hand to a troubled client. The drama is very professionally drawn—set and staging are modern and creative—and moves forward with clever devices. For me some of the monologues run a little long, but the climax avoids any tidy wrap-up, but packs a wallop nonetheless.
This is a very rewarding collection. Modern themes hold center stage, and draw the author’s vituperation, which is always pointed and appropriate. Take this collection up, and be reminded of the emotional punch good shorter fiction can provide.
In her latest novel, Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner treats us to a cynical, shifty first-person protagonist who must pursue her work using a series of assumed names. One thing on this job that diverts her: a series of email missives from a onetime Paris radical (now retired from trying to overthrow governments) who tries to guide a group of younger, sort-of like-minded activists in rural southwest France. The emails are long and full of philosophical and scientific reflections; as part of her undercover job our narrator intercepts them, and finds the the man who writes them, a fellow-traveler-emiritus named Bruno, somewhat inspiring. In fact, these detailed emails carry much of the thematic weight and depth of the book.
Our protagonist infiltrates a hippyish commune in the Guyenne region; she’s fluent in French, but retains the accent of her native U.S., which probably puts the natives a little more at ease, because the poor accent would make sense. The commune plans a protest and a blockade at an agricultural fair—they’re opposed to the overreaching state plan for hijacking the area’s groundwater: to siphon it into vast catchment basins for eventual state-supported agribusiness use.
So, this caper novel includes a number of email lectures from the eminence grise agitator, enjoyed by our covert agent but abjured by their intended audience, the young cadre of activists. She also uses them to glean clues for what these youthful disciples/agitators are planning and when they’re planning it. One understands the potential tie-in of these epistles to the plot, but it’s tenuous at best, principally because the email lectures devolve into lunatic ravings at a couple of points. The author may have intended an independent critique of the anti-establishment group of young people, but the older influential patron loses credibility, and any tension between the two sets of aims fails. If she wanted to illustrate the hopelessness over the decades of overthrowing capitalism, she succeeds much better.
With a protagonist who is unsympathetic until the very end, an out-of-touch mentor who disqualifies himself from mainstream thought and behavior, and a listless band of protestors living an agrarian bad dream, there is little to engage the reader. The plot is balanced and mildly suspenseful, and I appreciated a few of the more caustic observations made by the first-person narrator. A disappointment.
Translated from the Dutch by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a professor of history at the University of Leiden from 1915 until the Nazis closed the university in 1942 and held him hostage until shortly before his death. He first published The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919; this book represents a translation of 1921’s second edition. The current translators, both from the University of Western Washington, cite problems with the first translation into English, such as adaptations and misstatements that change Huizinga’s original meaning, as justification for their own version. This current version was not published until 1996, after the death of Ulrich Mammitzsch.
Huizinga set himself the task of pinpointing the changes in philosophy, art, and literature which mark the end of the Medieval period, and the beginning of the Renaissance. He tackled it with unstinting effort and monumental erudition. He sets his stage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Burgundy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Following a rigorous and concise logic, Huizinga establishes the culture of the time: in secular politics it was a time of insecurity, marked by separation of families, regions, and nations into feuding parties. This insecurity led nobility and the merchant class to agitate with their overlords to subject their neighbors to a reign of terror. In religion, the Church’s faithful followed a primitive (Huizinga’s word) and impersonal form of adoration based on visual icons (which made it easier to worship) and an absurd legalistic weighing and balancing of sins and indulgences as they tried to finagle their way into heaven. Literature, even of the more serious, higher kind, followed set formulae of verse length, rhyming patterns, and even theme.
The author treats each of these features at considerable length, and cites a wide range of contemporary sources and examples. I found the whole to be entirely convincing, even though the later chapters suffer from an overabundance of citation and a growing mix of sources, themes, and points he felt he had to make. The book is set up somewhat awkwardly as well: I read the epub version and found jumping between the many passages in the original Middle French, and the appendices containing translations, a bit burdensome. I’m not sure how I would have solved this issue; I may have put the originals in appendices and let the main narrative flow with translations.
Huizinga takes pains to point out areas where 14th or 15th Century Burgundian or French thought anticipated the Renaissance humanism which would follow, but his conclusions about such things always carries magisterial weight. I am no one to question it. He’s always reasonable, specific, and balanced.
This is a useful volume; it puts the curious reader directly in touch with a famous scholar who has studied his subject closely and communicates his conclusions persuasively. If this period in history interests you, this late-coming treatise is an excellent place to start.
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