"Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson" by Darren Staloff

 

Subtitle: The Politics of the Enlightenment and the American Founding

Darren Staloff, Ph.D., a historian at the University of Florida, considers three prominent Founding Fathers in Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson. He takes up each with reference to their role in the founding of the United States, and with reference to each other. Using their own writings and extensive quotes from contemporary and later sources, he paints an extensive and even-handed portrait of each. Steeped in the thought and politics of the time, these in-depth sketches immerse the reader in the personality and the grand achievement of each. They will round out your understanding of each in grand if unblinking style.

In grossly broad strokes, mainstream Enlightenment thought rejected any appeal to the supernatural or divine revelation. This trend brought into common thought a disenchantment with the idea that the world was run by force of some supreme being, and contemplated instead, the natural forces which one could observe and test.

Continuing broadly, Hamilton used a superior mind and indefatigable energy to push through his vision of a strong central authority, with a central bank, a very active  commercial market, and government investment in infrastructure. In his view these  would together generate wealth and plenty for the new nation. This was at a time when the new country was overwhelmingly agrarian in nature, both in output and civic vision. Obviously his program ultimately carried the day.

Adams was a brilliant, sometimes prickly, always vain but honest statesman and politician, whose vision for the new Constitution was enacted in its entirety. I believe that any sharing of this credit, by any other contemporary thinker or Founding Father is illusory, and simple myth-building. Plain wrong.

Jefferson’s gift for lofty language created a grand American myth; his phrasing has inspired foreign revolutionary zealots and American schoolchildren alike. His presidency failed, however: the Embargo Act plunged the new nation into its first deep depression, and produced none of the desired results of projecting nascent American power internationally. In addition, his questionable parochiality about the slavery question, and his hare-brained scheme for solving it did nothing to prevent or forestall the bloody sectional conflict to come. In fact, it helped assure that the conflict would come.

As a history of the period, and three of its principal and most influential actors, this book is thorough and balanced  — excellent.

 

 

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"The Paris Express" by Emma Donoghue

Widely admired author Emma Donoghue manages to capture some version of fin de siècle zeitgeist while also spinning a suspenseful action narrative in The Paris Express. She sets her scene in an actual 1895 out-of-control express train that crashes into the Montparnasse station, and assembles within it a cast of historical figures, (some of whom were actually passengers on the wreck). This clever device gathers together key figures who represent the coming train wreck that is the 20th Century. It’s a bravura performance; I recommend it for its intelligence, its respect for its readers, and not least for its breathless pacing.

A national railway express leaves Granville on the Normandy coast bound for Paris, and its passengers include a handful of deputies, or representatives, of the Orne Department of France. The author also calls “all aboard” to scientists, prominent engineers and captains of industry, and literary and artistic lights of the period, and a very angry young anarchist with a bomb. Donoghue names and clearly identifies these souls in the novel. The author mounts an elaborate, nail-biting race against death, in a highly diverting, and very well-organized novel.

And the interaction of these disparate characters, along with the threat to everyone’s life, along with the speed of the action, all make for a very rewarding, heart-quickening experience. This mélange represents for me the headlong speed and power of wrenching change the world will suffer as the 19th Century swings along into the 20th. For on this train is a French automotive pioneer and industrialist Émile Lavassor; Irish dramatist John Millington Synge; Max Jacob, the French poet and painter; Henry Tanner, the African-American painter; and Marcelle Lapicque, a neurophysiologist who lived until 1960. This is not an exhaustive list, but it illustrates the grand scope of Donoghue’s story, in that it brings all these characters into play. The momentum, the dreadnaught, irresistible forces in play, would wreck any static edifice in its way, be it Montparnasse station, or any settled, backward-looking lassitude. I was quite out of breath at the end of this book.

The author shows a steely discipline as she yolks her wildly divergent elements into a cohesive, yet breakneck, story. It’s very well done.


 

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"Twist" by Colum McCann

 

Distinguished author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin, Thirteen Ways of Looking, among many others) takes up the story of an enigmatic seeker of sense and connection in our fractured modern world. In describing his hero, Conway, he achieves such subtle effects that I felt the need to go back and reread his early descriptions: a man with a focus on something so distant as to remove him from his current surroundings; his calmness and non-committal approach and way of speaking; an unwillingness to display or discuss his inner self. This introduction indicates we’re unmistakably in the hands of an accomplished master of fiction.

Conway directs the repair of undersea cables which house the fiber optic filaments which form the infrastructure of the internet. We view his story from the first-person narrative of Fennell, a journalist with a debilitating, haunting history. He’s left the scourge of alcoholism behind as he boards Conway’s ship (at p. 29 of the hardcover edition):  “I, too, have known those sorts of days when I have put on the Prufrock smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life. ¶ But I am getting ahead of myself. I was still, at the time, eager to dwell on the story of a repair.”

McCann goes to some trouble to equate the internal workings of this ocean-going vessel with the organic internal functions of humans: after introducing the ship’s engine room crew (p. 75): “They moved among the propulsion engines, the water pipes, the boilers, the generator, the filters, the fuel strainers. There was something human about it too: the mysterious workings of the viscera, the liver, the kidneys, the heart.” And two pages later, he looks at a cross section of cable, surprised that they run parallel in perfect concentric circles — no twisting. “At the inner core, protected by several layers, lay the glass tubes. The conduits of the light. The xylem and phloem.” Thus the cable parallels the internal conduits of plants which carry water and nutrients back and forth.

With a faint Ishmael-and-Ahab echo we sail along the west coast of Africa, hunting a break in an undersea cable. Conway worries about Fennell, who is a freelance journalist, and keeps him at a distance. He views him as an interloper who worrisomely  seeks to publicize — what? Conway’s own history features heart-rending ruptures, and a murky past he wishes to keep hidden. At length Conway, with a singular personal approach, vandalizes a cable beneath the Mediterranean, near Alexandria. It turns out that there are dummy devices — decoys, or dress rehearsals, maybe, anchored to submerged cables all around Europe and the Middle East. We are left in the dark about these mysterious sunken packs; did Conway install them, as seems quite likely?

In his Epilogue, McCann encapsulates one feature of modern times with beautiful, blunt brevity (p. 218): “Nobody could quite understand why the plot would be so  intricately counterfeit, and why someone would go to the great difficulty of diving all that way just to hide something that was likely never to be seen. It triggered speculation across the internet: everyone with an opinion, of course, the obscene certainty of our days.”

These personal and multinational energies drive Twist’s narrative. McCann brings us along with a style that propels, but reveals nothing that would soften or dull the drama inherent. Even as Conway seeks an elusive undersea rupture to repair, he and the great love of his life have rent themselves asunder, and neither we nor Fennell can really tell the depth of Conway’s loss or loneliness.

There are plain lessons here, and it doesn’t take a deep reader to find them: the internet provides the infrastructure that assures “the obscene certainty of our days”; there is not a square inch of the planet that doesn’t bear the imprint of humankind’s traditional effluent industries; there’s no telling what another person thinks, or suffers, or desires. In sober reality, Fennell realizes an ultimate, concluding truth: “Mine has been a lifetime of dropped connections.”

It’s a sombre book, built around a high-stakes adventure story; it reflects sombre realities, but I would never dream of discouraging you to pick it up, dear reader. It’s done in a terse, muscular style, with McCann’s assured artistry. It will encourage your mature reflections, and impress you with the author’s awesome powers. McCann is by acclamation one of the front rank of novelists writing in English today.

 

 

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"Songdogs" by Colum McCann

Colum McCann’s first person narrator in Songdogs, named Conor, goes on a quest to understand his parents and perhaps find his long-estranged mother. This trip is not trivial in terms of miles covered — it takes him from hot, dusty Mexican towns, to a forest ranger lookout above the tree line in Idaho, to his windswept native Ireland — nor is it lacking for vivid colors, diverting characters, or a discussion of the long-standing grievances between his parents. His trek is absorbing, at times frustrating, but finally touching as reunited father and son gently spar, one generation against the other, and come to easy terms with each other.

Conor, in his early 20s, travels with a monstrous backpack in a passive, desultory way, and finally arrives at his father’s home in a small town in western Ireland. He surprises him by showing up, and the main current-day narrative kicks off. This story, as Conor tells it, becomes the central thrust of the novel, almost as if by default. Conor vividly remembers his mother, a captivating señorita from a sun-blasted town in eastern Mexico. Michael, Conor’s father, cut a swath through the remote town after mustering our from the war, and settled down with 19 year-old Juanita.

The narrative thus follows two time lines, one current, and one in the past. In the present-day story Conor finds Michael, who now lives a diminished, alienated life — it’s squalid: he neglects his hygiene, doesn’t do laundry, or pay any attention to the keeping his house. Their reuniting doesn’t spark any dramatic changes, but reacquaintance results in a subtle evolution between the two, where hard truths are acknowledged, and new understandings bloom.

This novel contains the vividly personal language of the questing youth. It contrasts sharply with the received platitudinal wisdom spouted by the hermit-like father. Don’t conclude that this is a depressing read; it’s way too vivid and plotted far too cleverly. It has as its core a classic human story of a family splintered by strong personalties and faded dreams. To catch an early example of McCann’s undeniable gifts, Songdogs serves beautifully.

 

 
 

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"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead

 

Colson Whitehead takes us on an unforgettable ride in The Underground Railroad. He displays the horrific cruelty endemic to the America's Peculiar Institution, and shows how it and violent oppression ruled the relationship between blacks and whites during the first half of the 19th Century. Never ending spirals of hope and defeat put these rails on a roller coaster; it’s a vivid, gritty, honest, and ultimately awe-inspiring travail.

We witness the life-and-death flight of Cora, a Georgia slave girl, who crosses the threshold of womanhood just as the story unfolds. Hers, of course, is a harrowing tale; she escapes her bonds and for a time believes herself free, only to fall into the clutches of the authorities again. This sequence holds our attention and dashes our hopes on multiple occasions. Through it all Whitehead keeps America’s violent, sneering racism  front and center.

The author surprised me by employing his title—a well-established term in American history—in a literal sense. But this playful (?) use allows him a series of episodes in which our fugitives struggle with hopelessness in utter darkness, unsure at times if they are even traveling in the right direction.

Whitehead draws out his climactic events superbly, while drawing in his readers. This is a fine adventure: we live and die with each twist of the plot. The author presents a textbook example of a suspenseful, harrowing chase while instructing us in the history of escaped slaves and the settlements in which they began their new lives. A rewarding read in more ways than one.

 

 

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"Loom in the Loft" by Jay Black

 

In his novella Loom in the Loft, Jay Black presents the bildungsroman of a young but precocious boy n the Canadian province of Ontario who comes under the spell of a beautiful neighbor woman. This calculating person takes advantage of his innocence and through no effort of her own, reaps a windfall far greater than she could ever have imagined—or deserved. It’s a spare but promising piece from a writer whose poems in English and French have won multiple awards.

Protagonist Drew is a pubescent lad, tall for his age and sophisticated beyond his years, whom a 30 year-old neighbor woman takes advantage of. In exchange for initiating him she works him hard, cooking, cleaning, doing the yardwork, helping with her weaving business, and running errands. (Please don’t expect anything explicit or pointedly titillating here; intimate events are handled very obliquely.) Another neighbor, a nonagenarian widow, adds tension in a surprising twist, and Drew’s life—and the novella—gain momentum and intrigue.

I’ve indicated the piece is spare; the prose is clean and serviceable—I appreciate Black’s straightforward approach. He adds depth and a bit of color to his main character, since his interests and actions are just what they should be. Or nearly so. I could have done with slightly more building-up of his sophistication and worldly wisdom, but this only counts as a quibble. Making him two or three years older would have done the trick, for me. The author also features a faint touch of metafiction, which is an ambitious stroke for this piece, and it feels unnecessary. Overall, though, Black paces his story well, withholds the right details when he needs to, and portrays his characters’ faults and virtues with a gifted writer’s instinct.

On balance, this is an enjoyable fiction that surprises with its well-built momentum; its virtues far outweigh its meager flaws and augur well for this writer’s future work.

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"The Rings of Saturn" by W.G. Sebald

 

Translated from the German by Michael Hulse.

W.G. Sebald eschews character and plot and barely has a unifying framework for his 1998 novel The Rings of Saturn. Instead of these orthodox fictional features, he spends his ten chapters describing his endless walks around Suffolk near the east coast of England. During his peregrinations he considers a range of intriguing topics in the most engaging and evocative language I have read in a very long time. The Rings of Saturn is inspired, wide-ranging, deep, surprising, and unpredictable. Not to mention superb.

Sebald leads off saying he traveled to the east of England to do a study of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a unique and forward-looking scientist and philosopher. Sebald mentions Browne a few more times in the book, but we learn as we go that this will not be his principal focus. He traipses across the Suffolk heath in an exhausting walking tour: he tries to find Somerleyton, a great estate of the region, and recaps its many wondrous and excessive features. He gets lost in his wanderings, seemingly more than once, but manages to find a writer he was going to visit—Michael Hamburger, who, as a boy, fled Nazi Germany with his parents in 1933. He considers what it must have been like to experience that, and begins, oddly, to assume the man’s experiences and consciousness as his own.

And just as he rambles across Suffolk, the author’s mind takes trips far and wide. There is no subject beyond his scholar’s ambit: whole towns that once held important places in the regional and national economy have only one tower left before it too will surrender before the advancing sea; the tale of the Ashbury family estate, of some repute in the area, but which at the time of writing, Sebald finds the home is dilapidated, with only the ground floor habitable, and the family distracted and engaged in useless activities, like the building of a boat which the builder acknowledges will never sail, and the sewing together of bridal veils which will never be worn; and finally, the story of Reverend Ives who is visited in around 1800 by an exiled young French nobleman. This vicomte falls in love with the Reverend’s daughter during his stay, but returns to France, heartbroken, having confessed that he is already married. We learn at length that the young man is the world-renowned writer and memoirist, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand.

 

The somber palette of loss and decay pervades Rings of Saturn. But that does not make for an unpleasant book. On the contrary, Sebald’s treatment of his theme of the universality of change brings the reader constant surprise and wonder at his erudition. The author travels by foot as if in a dream—indeed, lengthy passages regale of remembered dreams, often going on for pages, in astonishing, impossible detail. This book will treat readers to the author’s erudition, his courtly prose, and his inventive format. Not to be missed!

 

 

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"Contrary" by Laury A. Egan

 

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.

 

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"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner

 

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.

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"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga

 

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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