AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

• An Appalachian Voice Speaks for OhioA Conversation with Kari Gunter-Seymour
• Renee H. Shea

In June 2020, when Ohio governor Mike DeWine called Kari Gunter-Seymour to offer her the position of the state's poet laureate, she promised, "I'm going to be lifting up my people. I'm going to be lifting up Appalachia." She has done that and far more as the author of three poetry collections: A Place So Deep inside America It Can't Be Seen (2020), Serving (2020), and Alone in the House of My Heart (2022). Dirt Songs, her fourth collection, is forthcoming in 2024. A ninth-generation Appalachian, Gunter-Seymour was awarded the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship to edit and publish I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), the first anthology to focus exclusively on Ohio-based Appalachian teens and adults. She is also the founder and executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project, a literary, visual, and performing arts organization created to address discrimination against women in the Appalachian region. She holds a BFA in graphic design and an MA in photography from Ohio University.

What led you to apply for the position of poet laureate of Ohio?

When that call came out just as I was finishing up my term as poet laureate of Athens County [Ohio], a whole lot of people got in touch with me. I hadn't planned to apply, but then when people who were close to me said, "Think about the work you could do," I realized that this is my chance to continue working with folks who are recovering from addiction—something that's near and dear to me. If I have that title by my name—Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio poet laureate—I thought it would carry some weight and open up doors.

Still, I certainly never thought I'd have a chance, because I am aware of the amazing talent in this state. But the laureate position to me is a position of service—and not everyone wants to serve. I was fortunate that [End Page 141] the governor was on board with my project, and his office has helped me to be able to actualize working with folks who are incarcerated, women in recovery, incarcerated teens, students all over our state in all kinds of situations.

So that's the essence of what led me to decide I wanted the possibilities. It wasn't about thinking I'll get to go all over and read my poetry. I don't mean to be briggity, but I was already doing that. I was lucky to have acquaintances all over the state, so I was traveling and doing a good bit of reading my poetry. But as poet laureate, I have been given the privilege of going into the prisons and schools—specific places where I feel I can really make some

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• My New Novel/The Down Payment by Ottessa Moshfegh and Issy Wood
• Rene Marzuk (bio)

How does one go about interposing a critical layer between a short story and its prospective readers? What can the commentator do before a short story, other than pointing to the text? The form does not seem amenable to critical intervention. Giving away crucial elements could jeopardize the intended effect of pacing and compression, for instance, and in a short story every element is crucial. Whereas collections or anthologies offer the opportunity to tease out overarching themes or strategies, a single short story puts the reviewer in a bind unless one happens to be in the presence of something else entirely.

Ottessa Moshfegh's "My New Novel" is not a novel at all, but—you guessed it—a short story, although one that cannot be extricated from the circumstances of its publication. It is the initial offering from Picture Books, an intriguing new imprint from Gagosian, the well-known art gallery mammoth. According to its press release, Picture Books will focus on "publishing fiction by leading authors alongside contributions by celebrated contemporary artists." Writer Emma Cline, credited with the original idea, wanted to create a space where artists could respond to works of fiction, "a space for a new kind of dialogue between art and fiction."

The slim, hardbound volume featuring "My New Novel" has been soberly laid out by Peter Mendelsund, writer, designer, and creative director of The Atlantic. Protected by an inner sleeve, the book includes a folded reproduction of Issy Wood's oil painting The Down Payment (2021) that opens up to a 24" × 35.5" outsized poster. To date, Picture Books includes only one other publication in its roster: a pairing between Percival Everett's "Grand Canyon, Inc." and a photograph by Richard Prince.

I have purposely deferred any mention of the intrinsic attributes of either [End Page 40] Moshfegh's or Wood's pieces because I want to emphasize that we are in the presence of a composite piece. My New Novel/The Down Payment is in fact most interesting as a site of confluence between genres. It is not so much a book in the common sense of the word as it is a hybrid, experimental commodity presented as a beautiful object, somewhat in the proximity of an art exhibition catalog. In lieu of a reflection on the interconnection between art and literature, the piece offers itself as evidence of it. However, in lieu of a conversation betw

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• Mr. President by Miguel Ángel Asturias
• Vivian Arimany (bio)

The prime of the Latin American Boom feels long evanesced. At the same time, its literary traditions and tendencies have never felt more present, a very loud guest at one's house. With the recent critical and commercial success of authors such as Mónica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin (winner of the 2022 National Book Award for translation), and Mariana Enriquez, among others, the global market is clearly still fascinated with Latin American literature that [End Page 79] blurs distinctions between fantasy and literary fiction (whether through its plot line or writing style). Judging by the content of Latin American novels widely read in the United States, a window is never just a threshold from inside to outside but to also to another side in the region's literary tradition. In the 1960s publishers had a name for this tendency: magical realism, exploited by authors such as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. Some Anglophone publishers will still adhere to this terminology. I find it more productive to reject it, for its usage perpetuates a colonizing paternalism from the United States toward the Latin American continent.

Mr. President, by Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, deserves a place in the canon of not just Latin American, but world literature. This is a novel that, as much as it is a classic (it was originally published in 1946), remains relevant now in the twenty-first century. Asturias's seminal work is a historical novel criticizing the Guatemalan dictatorial regime of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). Despite drawing heavily from actual horrendous violations of human rights during Estrada Cabrera's dominion, the name of the country or the titular dictator is never stated. Even though the novel was published long after Estrada Cabrera's reign of terror, it coincided with another dictatorial project: Jorge Ubico's (1931–44). The plot centers around the unnamed dictator and the ways in which he terrorizes the country's community. There is an element of social awareness, for the narrator focuses on depicting how the less privileged (women, sex workers, queer and disabled people, homeless folks, etc.) are persecuted by the dictator's pervasive fist. In fact, the first chapter (aptly titled "In the Portal del Señor") centers around a group of beggars who live in the shadows of a portal. The events that constitute the novel's sto

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• Ride On, See You by Ann McGlinn
• Edward M. Bury (bio)

Life perceived in the present, of course, can be considered as being fluid, defined by minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. Fiction allows the author to re-create life that transcends the clock and calendar, that offers a virtual canvas of seemingly disparate and perhaps incongruous events which can be recast and molded into a cohesive and compelling story.

To tell the story of how a widower and a troubled young boy find solace in the wake of personal trauma, Ann McGlinn follows a somewhat formulaic process in the compact novel Ride On, See You. A prologue provides a basic account of the defining story line in the novel: the crash of a small plane in the Florida Everglades during a short, routine pleasure flight that resulted in a fatality. The account of this tragic event is followed by alternating short chapters chronicling the past and current life of the protagonist, David, journal passages from his late wife, Marie, and the personal struggles of Emmett, an Irish kid saddened and confused following the death of a classmate's mother and the continued, palpable tension between his parents.

Mostly set in and around modern Dublin, Ride On, See You captivates the reader through the intermingling of a somewhat standard plot—seeking redemption, solace, and closure following great personal loss—with memorable anecdotes and colorful characters. McGlinn employs short, poignant passages that frequently deviate from the chronological order to craft the tale of how teenage Indiana-born David, the son of academics, meets and falls in love with St. Christopher's School classmate Marie while he and his parents take up residence in the fabled city. Years later, as a married couple, David and Marie leave Ireland and settle in Miami, where he pursues his career as an academic. Longing for her home across the Atlantic, Marie, a fledgling author and artist, finds temporary work at a restaurant as a way to adjust to life [End Page 76] in a place quite different from her home, a place where most neighbors prefer to stay in their air-conditioned homes rather than venture outside.

The plane crash and loss of his wife brings David, who was the pilot, back to greater Dublin in order to put their home in the nearby coastal community of Dalkey on the market and sort through Marie's belongings. Not only was the trip painful due to his wife's recent death, but David also realizes after wandering down Grafton Street and into the Temple Bar neighborhood—the embodiment of the very fabric of the city's music, art, and cult

• InterventionAn Interview with Ben Okri
• Frederick Luis Aldama

Ben Okri's creative energy and reach knows no bounds. His breathtaking repertoire spans an impressive collection of books that give new shape to nonfiction and fiction forms across all genres. His awe-inspiring accolades are legion, including prestigious honorary doctorates from around the globe, the revered Booker Prize, and being knighted for services to literature. He's this, and much more. He's our modern-day planetary Griot—a master storyteller whose interwoven voices create soul-stirring, multilayered choral works that guide us from illusion to truth, from suffering to transcendence, and from mere words to meaningful action. In his words, he's an "orchestral writer" who is meant to be absorbed directly, and at the subliminal.

Born and raised in Nigeria, then finding his way to London in adulthood, Ben has weathered loss, torment, and hardship, surviving civil wars, death threats, and homelessness. His truths simmer subtly beneath the surface of his works, which masterfully guide us to experience new emotions, thoughts, and perspectives on the world we inhabit. From the raw and gritty debut novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), to the enchanting spirit-child-narrated triptych series that includes The Famished Road (1991), Songs of Enchantment (1993), and Infinite Riches (1998), to the innovative Haiku-shaped short stories in Tales of Freedom (2009), renamed as The Comic Destiny, and more recent creations like the dystopic The Freedom Artist (2019), the award-winning play The Outsider (2017), the poignant children's ecological fable Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021), and the piercing-truth poems in A Fire in My Head (2023), Ben leads us on a transformative journey. Here and in his many works not mentioned, Ben tears apart the scripts that straitjacket self-perceptions and destructive master narratives. He asks us to pause, listen, and act. He powerfully reminds that without the vital spark of literature, music, and all art forms, the world dies.

I had the great pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Ben Okri. His quiet, deeply thoughtful presence and puissant words exemplified how both [End Page 48] in his art and in his soul, he is one of our great catalysts of imaginative and real change.

I remember when you won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road back in 1991. I was finishing my undergrad degree in literature and reading Hanif Kureishi, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Kazuo Ishiguro. You along with these titans of global literature marked a huge watershed for me. I dedi

• In Search of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
• Anthony Madrid (bio)

I mentioned to my students I had never understood the grammar of the first sentence of "The Star-Spangled Banner." They didn't know what I was talking about, and maybe you don't either. So, look:

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fightO'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming?

The difficulty arises at "O'er the ramparts we watch'd." The modern mind helplessly parses the sentence this way:

Can you see the thing that we hailed so proudly, whose stars and stripes we watched o'er the ramparts?

But, see, if you take it that way, where the thing we were watching was the flag, the last part of the sentence becomes ungrammatical:

Can you see the thing that we hailed so proudly, whose stars and stripes we watched o'er the ramparts were streaming—?

I had to repeat all of what I just said three or four times before everyone in class was "on board," that is, before everyone could see the problem, and admit they had always been uneasy about this, without really knowing it.

Someone pointed out that a great many things children are made to repeat over and over make very little sense to them, and it's an outrage that no one cares about this. His example was:

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

("Thy kingdom come"? What in the world does that mean? And also: Thy what will be done?)

A different student pointed out she was very surprised and disappointed I [End Page 58] had not already settled the point regarding the ramparts, as such negligence seemed to run counter to the Spirit of Joyful Research, about which I usually seemed so adamant. I promised to straighten the matter out as soon as I got home.

At six that evening, covered in sweat, I sat at my desk and wrote out the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner"—all the words I knew. Which is to say: the first verse, 25 percent. I doubt I had ever heard any of the rest of it, even once in my life. I am fifty-four.

The first thing I noticed when I wrote out the words surprised me very much. The meter of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the same as the meter of the poem that everyone calls "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (and which is actually called "A Visit from Saint Nicholas"). Observe:

Anapestal tetrameter. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is entirel

• Cormac McCarthy's Abendrot
• David Cowart (bio)

For this reader, convinced that he beheld in Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo the apex literati of our time (yes, yes, white males all), apocalypse took the form foretold when, on June 13, a third of that splendid asterism was swept from the firmament. One step ahead of death ("this fell sergeant," as Hamlet says, so "strict in his arrest"), McCarthy had seen the last of his twelve novels into print only last December. He died scant weeks before his ninetieth birthday, which he would have observed on July 20. As William Butler Yeats supplied one of McCarthy's best-known titles, one may well, on this occasion, invoke again the opening of Auden's elegy for the great Irish poet: "Earth, receive an honored guest."

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer recalls being at Oxford and encountering "an old gentleman" who told him: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." I am haunted by this anecdote because it seems to characterize reading itself as "no country for old men"—to augur an end to a lifetime's joy in that pastime. And alas, though I read much of the night and go north in summer, I am less routinely transported by the books I dive into. Nor dare one indulge too frequently in the touchstones of yore (the last paragraphs of "The Dead," the first of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the fifth chapter of Urne-Buriall), lest they become filmed over with a blighting [End Page 178] familiarity. I could always take comfort, however, in the knowledge that new writing by a Cormac McCarthy (and, as intimated above, one or two of his contemporaries) could restore the wonted, primal delight.

Like most of his eventual readerdom, I came late to McCarthy. Friends had thrust copies of Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985) into my hands, but for me, as for so many others, it was All the Pretty Horses (1992) that blew my hair back and made me, more or less immediately, an acolyte. It met the criterion famously articulated by Kafka: a book should be the ax to the frozen sea within us. Mythic yet countermythic, the novel ends with its hero, John Grady Cole, displaying the thigh wound that links him to Odysseus, Jesus, and the Fisher King. As this roll call of archetypes implies, here was a flawless composite of quest narrative and, in all its permutations, romance: chivalric Western, love story, splendid adventure tale, the very essence of escape from the everyday. But all of it anchored, in the end, by that iron law of the McC

Reviewed by:

• Passing Again by Tom LeClair
• Neil D. Isaacs (bio)

About halfway through this self-designated novel, during a conversation between Tom and Michael, two of the three major characters (the third being the photographer K), Tom says, "Readers should know writing is inherently fictional, an arbitrary code and fabricated mechanism." This seems to be an equally good description of this book, once described to me as being "about rejuvenation near the end—of a life, of a series, of fiction itself." Put these statements together and a reader gets a partial accounting for what might be called a brilliant account of Passing Again—a challenging book on its own account and a summary (or conclusion) of a quintet of novels.

As briefly as possible within my limitations of space and understanding, a review of the preceding four books is called for. The earliest, Passing Off (1996), is passed off as a basketball book. Its first-person narrator tours Greece while playing as a point guard, referencing the game's history, and professing his command of ecology, history, language, literature, and revolution. He has changed his last name from McKeever to Kyvernos (informally, Keever) to satisfy the Greek requirement for some aspect of "Grecian" for any pro player beyond a single American all-star.

Keever has brought his wife of many years, Ann (and their five-year-old daughter, Sara), for broadening. But when he begins to tour the region with his team, he is accompanied by an alluring woman called Eleni. More than a sex object, she persuades Michael to join her underground group, which is [End Page 83] planning to destroy the Parthenon as a call for changing the old-time beliefs and behaviors of modern Greece. When Keever signs a document to endorse their beliefs, he agrees to engage in the international money trade and then to deliver a powerful plastic for the explosion. Using his basketball skills of speed, deception, and accuracy, he manages to recover the package and escape from Athens.

Several years pass before the second novel, Passing On (2004). Keever has worked among European hoopsters for two years after Greece, in Italy and Spain, although missing his beloved Greece. The persistent first-person narrator, Michael Keever, soon reveals that the earlier novel was actually written by Ann, because she thought she'd be protecting the monetary value she (and Sara) need. Working part-time as a referee, he has a severe accident that sends him to the hospital for a hip replacement, ending his basketball career (though hoops references enrich the text thro

• No, AlexaAI Isn't Going to Destroy Art
• David Riddle Watson (bio)

The contemporary world is experienced through a variety of mediums simultaneously. In fact, one can now travel to art museums through VR headsets or immerse oneself in the world of Van Gogh. Recently, in the art world, we have all learned a new vocabulary full of investment terms like "non-fungible" and "blockchain," and with them endless get-rich-quick schemes and lots of Bored Apes. The rise of new technologies always brings with it the danger of falling prey to novelty on one hand and an equally serious risk of succumbing to nostalgia or becoming irrelevant to the concerns of one's time on the other.

A central concern of many in the modern art world is the rise of digital art, which can be produced by artificial intelligence, using popular engines such as DALL·E 2, an open AI platform that allows users to type in text and create art. For example, one could type "guitar player in the style of Picasso" and after a few seconds one gets results. But has one created art? Or what seems to be the bigger question, what is this going to do to the art world? One popular social media post making the rounds in December 2022 laments that art professors are telling their students they should just drop out. (Whether this is true or not, I imagine, is highly debatable and could be as much of an indictment on the institution in the age of AI.) This has led to arguments about copyright and ownership. As one artist, Kim Leutwyler, says in the Guardian, "When I started seeing all of these Lensa app-generated portraits posted by some of my friends, even some other artists, I was instantly skeptical." She continues, "They are calling it a new original work, but some artists are having their exact style replicated exactly in brush strokes, colour, composition—techniques that take years and years to refine." In a story that puts this issue front and center, upon winning the Colorado State Art Fair in 2022 using an AI-generated submission, James Allen quipped, "Art is dead, dude. It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost."

As a musician myself, I'm sympathetic to the concern that technology has commodified art to a point previously unimaginable. For example, with devices like Auto-Tune you can turn someone who cannot sing into a singer, [End Page 44] and with downloadable chord progressions one can simply conjure an arrangement from the ether; however, I believe the ability to respond to the new technological environment to be a requirement of all artists. We can all imagine the terror that must have gone through the heart of the portrait artist upon the invention of the daguerreotype, the precursor to the camera. Similarly, that same photographer has been forced to come to grips with P

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• Where We Lay Down by Jeffrey Franklin
• Adam Vines (bio)

Divided into six sections, Jeffrey Franklin's debut collection, Where We Lay Down, covers quite a bit of ground while still remaining cohesive, ribboning themes of patrilineal inheritances and relationships, masculinities, and place and history as overt demarcations and imposed signifiers and as subtle figurations for identity and memory. Each section is titled—"Fathers and Sons," "Making Love," Making War," "Homing," "Totem Animals," and "Full Emptiness"—and begins with an epigraph that helps frame the section and nods to Franklin's indebtedness to poets who influenced his style and formal acuity, such as Donald Justice, James Fenton, James Dickey, and Les Murray, among others. Furthermore, Franklin provides his father's drawings as introductions to the sections, further guiding the readers into the poems. All these reinforcements solidifying the structural, thematic, and rhetorical integrity of each section could come across as too leading and didactic, creating too much compartmentalization; however, I find the influences of epigraphs, of influential poets, and of a father's vision through his art fascinating, focusing my attention on the nuances of human relationships and relationships within art before I step into the poems opening each section. Franklin is a master of organization and considers deeply about an audience's engagement with his poems, which is so refreshing. [End Page 115]

The title of Franklin's collection, too, pulls at themes related to place, identity, and memory. Invoking the communal "we," he asks the audience to think about where they have lain before, where they have sprawled out or slept, where they have found comfort as children, as adults, and in this exercise, the audience considers these places and what comprises them and how they have shaped their identities and ideas about the world. In "Personal Effects," the plural third-person point of view drives the "voyeur's piety" of going through a loved one's objects ("cuff links," "pen nibs," "long discharged batteries"), which give us insight into the lived experience of "you" as well as "an unpredicted cache" of photographs "you" took of "a jaunty sailor, / a turbaned sultan, a harlequin with "Smitty" / penned on the back." All these "personal effects" combine to become monikers of "a life lived / by the ordering of the ordinary," which in itself is a brilliant ars poetica and speaks both to the observations of the "we" and the photographer's skill of capturing his subjects at ease "by never to anyone acting superior, / s