Like Fr. Robert Imbelli, I was prompted by Paul Griffiths’s review to read Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work. I found the book challenging in several ways. The writing, though generally lucid and often lyrical, can also be dense, knotted, abstruse. (Rose was a scholar of Continental philosophy, so perhaps this should come as no surprise.) The main challenge of Love’s Work, though, is the demanding nature of its philosophy of love. Rose writes of her many failed love affairs—and the implications of these failures—in an unflinching, unsentimental manner. “There is no democracy in any love relation,” Rose warns, “only mercy.” She explores what she calls “the joy and the agony of loving,” and, in her account, the joy can never be separated from the agony.

Still, despite and sometimes because of these difficulties, Love’s Work is an incredibly rich, illuminating text. At times, Love’s Work approaches poetry in its compressed suggestiveness: “It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.” This sentence could have come right out of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Speaking of poetry, the New York Review of Books reissue of Love’s Work includes as a kind of postscript a poem by Geoffrey Hill, and it’s this poem, “In Memoriam: Gillian Rose,” that I briefly want to look at. Like Rose, Hill is a notoriously difficult writer. As critic William Logan has written, Hill “has made brutally clear that the common reader is of no interest to him,” his thorny, allusive verse making “him a poet more despised than admired, and more admired than loved.”

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The great twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that Augustine’s Confessions is “possibly the most serious book ever written.” The operative word, of course, is “possibly,” but I have to say I’m inclined to agree. I have been reading the Confessions regularly since I was 16, and one of the great joys of my position at Villanova University is that I get to teach it each fall. As my teacher John Cavadini taught us, learning about Augustine is like learning about yourself. And I think my students see that. Many parts of Augustine’s story resonate with them: here is a person who also had questions about God, who got caught up with some strange groups of people, who both revered his mother and thought she was a little simple, who was caught up in lusts and didn’t always like his school studies, who mourned the death of friends, who was on the fast track to a bright career but gave it all up. He is so human that they are often surprised he is a saint.

I don’t know what exactly led Wittgenstein to say what he said, but I do know that he begins his magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations with a quotation in Latin from the Confessions about how Augustine learned language. My guess is that Wittgenstein saw the deep humanity in Augustine and admired how Augustine struggled with perennial human questions. As one of the great readers of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell once wrote, “For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression. He wishes an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our own skin, by a sense of powerlessness to penetrate beyond the human conditions of knowledge.” The same could be said, I would argue, about the Confessions.

Cavell has written perceptively about Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, JL Austin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare. He addresses them all in his fine book Must we mean what we say? His writing tends to explore “an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our own skin.” I have not yet read his latest book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, which in the manner of Augustine, Rousseau, and Emerson is an autobiography in the form of a series of philosophical journal entries. Cavell spent most of his academic career at Harvard, where he taught a future Rhodes scholar and translator of Martin Heidegger named Terrence Malick, whom we know today as the director of The Tree of Life. At Oxford, Malick began but did not finish a dissertation on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. Read the rest of this entry »

If you know Walter Mosley for his series of Easy Rawlins stories, already an established classic of the mystery genre, be prepared to be very surprised by his latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. Mosley’s protagonist is a 91-year old semi-recluse who depends for his lifeline to the world on his nephew Reggie. When Reggie is suddenly out of the picture, the 18-year old Robyn steps in. At first she works on putting some order into the chaotic apartment where Ptolemy Grey is slowly but surely descending into dementia. As affection and even love grows between this unlikely pair, she helps the old man to an encounter with a doctor who offers him an experimental drug that will probably kill him but may, just may, give him a clear head once again, for at least a time. Mr. Grey accepts the offer and enters into a kind of Faustian bargain in reverse. In order to have two months to do “some important stuff,” at death his body but not his soul will belong to the doctor he insists on calling the Devil. The medicine works wonderfully well and things proceed apace while in dementia and in his new-found clarity, we move backwards and forwards in time as Mr. Grey tries to recall the past and right the wrongs of the present.

You can read this book on a number of levels, though each I think is a variety of love story. There is the passionate but stormy love between Gray and his deceased wife, Sensia and the lower-key courtship in the present moment with his neighbor, Shirley Wring. The January/December love of Robyn and Mr. Gray is touching and tasteful. To her amusement she catches him looking admiringly at her legs, but he is wise enough to laugh at himself. As he says frequently, “If you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had it better.” It’s not easy to tell why Robyn takes the time with Mr. Gray that she does, because at least at first there’s nothing in it for her. Put it down to compassion and human goodness, though Gray is a witty and thoughtful word-smith in his lucid moments and genuinely charming when the medicine does its job. But the most important of the loves is surely Gray’s attempt to recall and be loyal to the memory of Coydog McCann, a man he knew as a child who died violently but left Gray an inheritance and a task to accomplish. It is this half-remembered something that impels Gray to his bargain with the doctor, this and the frustrations of being on the verge of serious dementia, a state that Mosley sketches out with great persuasiveness. Yes, this must be how it is just before one falls over the cliff into the ocean of total miasma.

Just as should be the case in romance, the last days of Ptolemy Gray are filled with love, generosity, grace and the thirst for justice. The element of violence is strongly present too, in the past of Coydog and in the present viciousness of one human being to another, but Grey triumphs over all of it and, we think, comes to his conclusion in peace with all the loose ends tied up. I confess that on first reading I hadn’t noticed that the book begins with an “Afterword” that teases the reader and almost, but not quite, gives the story away. Lovers of Easy Rawlins surely suspect that his creator is more than usually wise for a mystery-story writer. Here, if you would like it in enormously entertaining form, is further proof.

Is monogamy an unrealistic ideal or a fundamental requirement for a good, enduring marriage? Last month, Mark Oppenheimer published a provocative essay, ”Married with Infidelities” in the New York Times Magazine exploring the status of infidelity in contemporary marriages. Using the popular sex column of self-described “cultural Catholic” and “American Gay Male” Dan Savage as a frame for his argument, Oppenheimer thoughtfully and provocatively examines what Savage calls “America’s obsession with strict fidelity.” Savage has been arguing for close to two decades that monogamy is harder than we admit and that it’s time to develop a sexual ethic that honors the reality, rather the romantic ideal, of marriage.

Savage’s primary recommendation is that married couples need to be more honest about their sexual desires and, concurrently, acknowledge that the fulfillment of those desires — perhaps outside their marriage — may not be the most important measure of the health of their relationship. In other words, Savage both prioritizes sexual fulfillment (individuals deserve to have their sexual needs met — and, indeed, meeting those needs may enable them to remain in a marriage) and devalues fidelity (which may not be as important as joy, honesty, or humor to the maintenance of a good marriage).

Oppenheimer opens his essay with an exchange between himself and his wife: What would upset her more, he asks, “to learn that I was sending racy, self-portraits to random women, Anthony Wiener style, or to discover I was having an actual affair. She paused, scrunched up her mouth as if she just had bitten a particularly sour lemon and said, ‘An affair is at least a normal human thing.  But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird.’”  And so an interrogation of desire begins. An “actual affair” is normal, but tweeting crotch shots is bizarre. Still, as we know, what is common is not necessarily good.

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The AMC television series Breaking Bad has gotten lots of attention lately. (See, for instance, the long profile of the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, in the New York Times Magazine.) I only recently started watching the show, powering through the first two seasons in about a week and a half. Breaking Bad is a strange hybrid. On the one hand, it’s a pacing-around-the-room, can’t-sit-down thriller, creating suspense through all the usual means (plot twists, cliff hangers, creepy music). In this way, it’s a rather traditional show, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that Stephen King, whose novels brilliantly utilize the same tricks of the trade, was a fan.

At the same time, though, Breaking Bad is an absolute original, aesthetically daring and formally inventive. Despite its terrific plotting, it can be a challenging show to watch, asking patience of its viewers as it introduces inexplicable, disturbing images that it will then take an entire season to explain. The show has both beautiful cinematography—in particular, the striking landscape shots of Albuquerque, New Mexico reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s descriptions of the Arizona desert in Infinite Jest—and some of the most creatively gruesome images you will ever see, the kind that will make you marvel at the show’s genius and then later cause you nightmares. (At one point, for instance, a character tries to dissolve a body in acid in his porcelain tub, and things go terribly wrong.) Vince Gilligan has pulled off a difficult feat, creating a show that seems to be both pure entertainment and pure art. [I've tried not to give too much away, but be aware, some mild spoilers follow.]

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No less a Shakespeare  critic than Stephen Greenblatt, writing in the New York Times in early May, praised Arthur Phillips’s, The Tragedy of Arthur, as a remarkable production, especially the penning of a so–say lost “Shakespeare” play which bears the book’s title. I mean in no way to lessen the impact of Phillip’s latest novel, when I say that  in reading it I could not dispel the sense that I was trying to perform a work-book exercise of some distant school experience: connect columns of items set in parallel with properly drawn pencil lines. The book’s construction is by parallels – the Arthur of the title, the fictional Arthur Phillips who is the narrator (who presents himself as Arthur Phillips, the writer), the fictional Arthur’s father, also Arthur, and the Arthur of the “Shakespeare” play, The Tragedy of Arthur, which is the apparent focus of the work. These multiple Arthurs frame an elaborately constructed book – the novel in the form of the Introduction to a critical edition to the “Shakespeare” play. That the fictional Arthur’s father, Arthur Phillips, might have forged this play furthers the complications. Surely then, to read that there are plot parallels between the play’s five acts and the Introduction’s account of the life of the fictional Arthur Phillips, his twin sister, their artist/forger father and long suffering mother is only to be expected. Making the connections between and among all of these parallel developments of plot, character, and theme, is part of the delight of the fiction. Phillips must also convince us that the characters are in themselves worth our attention if his art is to go beyond puzzle making and masterful parody. On the whole Phillips populates the work with characters we can care about: Dana, the twin sister and unflattering mirror, the baseball loving step-father, the estranged Czech wife. Arthur, the father, is perhaps the most interesting in development; he lives a life of duplicity, on a quest to provide “magic” through his art of deception. He finds himself outside the law and behind bars for most of his life. His skills as a forger are the engines of the plot, and we have to suspend much disbelief to allow him to serve the role of master manipulator whose productions fall steadily short of escaping detection – the “Shakespeare” play being the one possible exception. But the relationship itself, between the narrator and his father, moves beyond improbability to revelation.

The desire for fictional autobiographical re-invention, to develop a main character who is not the author, but who bears many of her or his biographical details is a problematic penchant in other modern writers. I think of Paul Theroux and J.M. Coetzee in particular. These are not really confessional works, but they do raise a central question: what is the relationship between life and art? The tension is both important and irrelevant. I don’t want to indulge in silly paradoxes: an experience of the death of one close to us has a weight and force that the creation of a fictional death does not. The game element of art, the puzzle of the construction, distances us from what really greets us every morning, as opposed to that we confront in the turning of the page. These fictional autobiographies flag a form of deception and collusion between reader and writer – clearly mirrored in Phillips’ novel’s structure. The writer cheats the moment for a moment; our reading offers a reciprocal self- indulgence – we are privy to extraordinary confidences. But how deeply felt is the search for what one is (as in this novel’s case) in the momentous fictional missteps of failed marriages, estranged children, and betrayal of loved ones? The catalogue of crimes and the confessions that lead to greater realization in the end sit undoubtedly in the world of fictional exploration – what might have been or “there but for the grace of God . . .” The author creates a version of his or her “identity” which transgresses and survives to be overcome by the redemption (or loss) of the last lines of the work. Publication makes accessible this confession of another version of the self; its claims upon us can come only by way of what it offers by artistry in execution. We are left with puzzling out the significance of a fictional alter-self and wondering how far this goes beyond narcissism.  Trust the tale not the teller, Lawrence warns us. In The Tragedy of Arthur, even the tale turns tail, and leaves us – if not betrayed, then hesitant to offer absolution.

I came belatedly to the reading of A.S. Byatt, beginning with her recent novel, The Children’s Book, and moving to Angels and Insects, and then to the Frederica Potter Quartet. (The omissions, mea culpa, are many.) The latter, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman, focuses on the family Potter, and constitutes an analysis of a generation that came of age in England in the fifties and experienced the accelerating social change of its post-war years. These were the days of the loss of empire, sexual liberation, wider access for women to male-dominated universities, the welfare state, and the effect of the new mass media. There are also clear pointers to the student revolutions of the time, establishment of communes, as well as expansion of higher education.

Frederica negotiates these upheavals with a self-assured recklessness that is matched by her extraordinary intellect and resilience. She suffers often for her excess and yet develops fierce independence, one that commands respect if not affection. Her friendships and her family’s connections provide the perspectives on education, art and literature, scientific research, aberrant psychology, and the social class structure. There are multiple voices, books that exist within books (as in Babel Tower) and, in an anticipatory look at the latest work, The Children’s Book.

Reading Byatt is rather like attending a free-wheeling graduate seminar – in literature, art and art history, natural science or psychology. The effect is never short of stimulating and demanding. The dialogue can have you reaching for a reference work or rereading passages to gather the import of thought – Frederica’s concern with the history of metaphor for one. The discussions of art, art history, the development of the novel, even the abstruse fantasies of religious mania all find assured places in the dialogue. Byatt seems an author who does not suffer foolish readers gladly.

Her range is wide. She can write with great sensitivity of the demands of parish life, in the person of Frederica’s brother-in-law, Daniel– a man fated to be both a suffering servant and self-effacing counselor. She is just as adept in the grasp of scientific research (in this case the biology of snails and the nascent use of computers in analyzing date) – as remarkable as it was in Angles and Insects. Her grasp of the Victorian arts and science were on display in that work, and in Possession and in The Children’s Book.

There is such substance in The Quartet, emotional, intellectual, stylistic and structural, that I wonder it has not kept in wider circulation. It is not even published in this country in a single volume as it is in the UK. Perhaps her focus is simply too British for greater notice here, but her artistry goes beyond any parochial concerns.

One of the many benefits of working at Commonweal is our great location in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Here you’re as likely to encounter a film or television crew as you are a Columbia professor.

In fact, crews are so commonplace in our neighborhood, I pay their equipment trucks and cast trailers little more notice than I do the tour buses at Grant’s Tomb or Riverside Church.

That changed last week.

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In these days when American bishops seem to have the time to write scolding books informing us how we should be thinking and acting in public life, arguably areas about which people in general know more than their clergy, it is refreshing to discover a newly-translated classic that breathes the air of common sense about the Church’s mission in the world. Earlier this year those who only read English were finally given access to Yves Congar’s remarkable 1950 book, True and False Reform in the Church. Congar, the single most influential theologian at Vatican II, wrote this text in the years immediately after the Second World War and published it immediately before Pius XII’s sobering attack on “the new  theology,” Humani Generis. No prizes for guessing why it was not immediately translated into English. But it is puzzling that it didn’t make it in the years after the Council, when everything else he wrote was translated. Perhaps it seemed to be passé at that point, writing as it did of the need for reform. But now that post-conciliar reform is mostly suppressed, it is as timely as ever.

Congar was an academic theologian alright, and sometimes quite dry, but this is not a book to frighten non-specialists away. Mostly, the fact that it speaks to our times as directly and helpfully as it did to a different world 60 years ago means that anyone concerned with the future of the Church will be motivated, even excited, by its open and hopeful tone. Of course we could all throw up our hands in despair and exclaim, “Well, we are clearly wasting our time if all our hopes for reform were uttered 60 years ago and ignored then!” But I’d recommend two different responses. First, attend to the specific proposals Congar makes. And second, be ready to see the patience he called for 60 years ago as coming pretty close to being exhausted.

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Recently, I came across a 2010 New Yorker interview with the novelist Chris Adrian. At the time of the interview, Adrian had been named one of the magazine’s top 20 writers under the age of 40. (Though this honor is only one item on an already impressive C. V.— Adrian has also been a fellow of pediatric haemotology-oncology at the University of California, San Francisco and a student at both the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Harvard Divinity School). When asked to name some of his favorite writers over 40, Adrian listed Ursula Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, John Crowley, and Padgett Powell.

I had already heard good things about Adrian, but this list really got me excited. Ursula Le Guin is a personal favorite—I’ve taught The Dispossessed before, and her 2008 Lavinia, a re-imagining of the Aeneid from the perspective of Aeneas’ wife, is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in awhile. I’ve written elsewhere about Robinson and Crowley (here and here), and suffice it to say that I think they are two of the best writers alive today. I hadn’t read anything by Powell, but three out of four ain’t bad, so I decided to give Adrian’s second novel, The Children’s Hospital (2006), a shot.

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Raymond Chandler didn’t just write some of the best American detective fiction. He also wrote about the genre and in much the same hard-boiled style of his own Philip Marlowe. He takes no captives, whether he is writing about authors or readers. “Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries,” wrote Chandler in 1949, “and I will show you a fool, a clever fool—perhaps—but a fool just the same.”As for the authors, he seems particularly to have disliked Agatha Christie, writing of one of her novels that “the whole setup for the crime requires such a fluky set of happenings that it could never seem real.” Chandler thought that “Conan Doyle showed no knowledge whatever of the organization of Scotland Yard’s men” and added that “Christie commits the same stupidities in our time.” “You do not fool the reader,” he added, “by hiding clues or faking character à la Christie.”

Since I do not want to be accounted a fool I am happy to admit to loving mysteries, to devouring them no less. But I am that supposedly most timid of detective fiction devotees, the lover of the “English cozy.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to the classic English story, most commonly set in some idealized English village, with a cast of characters that must include a vicar, a tweedy spinster, a local landowner and a retired army officer, preferably with military bearing and a suitable mustache. In other words, the setting must be utterly predictable in order that nothing steps in to interfere with the reader’s attention to the puzzle itself. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham were the queens of this sort of story in mid-20^th century England, and many others have followed them. Critics and readers have noted that the cozy places murder in the context of a stable, class-conscious English society that was fast disappearing just as the stories themselves were at their most popular. They were essentially an exercise in nostalgia if not a yearning for a putatively better world that lay back beyond the two world wars.

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The scenery is the star in the pilot episode of “Zen,” the new Masterpiece Mystery! series, launching Sunday, July 17. Based on the crime novels by Michael Dibdin, and produced by the folks who created “Wallander,” the series—which runs on Sundays through July 31 (check local listings)—features dark-and-handsome actor Rufus Sewell in the title role of Italian detective Aurelio Zen. But— at least in “Vendetta,” the first episode in the series—Sewell’s Zen doesn’t seem to have much personality: We keep hearing others talk about how honest he is (“It’s all a game, Zen. You just don’t know how to play it,” a successful colleague in the corrupt Rome police bureaucracy tells him). But a squeaky clean reputation and stylish suits alone hardly make for a compelling fictional character.

You don’t see him do much deduction either: He solves this initial puzzler—a murder case fraught with troublesome political ramifications—more or less by accident. Indeed, the episode is almost more of a thriller than a detective story. So fans of good old-fashioned brains-and-legwork sleuthing may find the program most memorable for the vistas: gorgeous Roman streetscapes and skylines; a picturesque centuries-old village perched at the top of a craggy hill; a roomy palazzo hemmed in by woods; and more. (The series was shot on location in Italy.)

Odd, then, that the team behind “Zen” should need to add another level of exoticism with decisively retro graphics and cinematography. The credit sequence, the slightly washed-out colors, even the odd swift camera tilt all recall movies from the 1960s or ’70s, even though the story is set in more contemporary times. You get the feeling that “Zen”’s creators are trying to give you the sense of travelling back to a simpler, happier time (a time that, of course, never really existed).

New York Times TV critic Ginia Bellafante has called the relatively optimistic “Zen” the antidote to gloomy Scandinavia-generated crime tales like AMC’s ultra-mopey “The Killing” (based on a Danish series). Here’s hoping we soon get a new detective show that hits a happy medium—more revelatory of life’s somber hues than “Zen” is, but not a positive downer, like the aforementioned AMC offering.

“Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day.”

So begins The Infinities, the Irish writer John Banville’s first novel since his 2005 Booker-winning The Sea. As you might have guessed from the novel’s opening sentences, The Infinities is told from a divine perspective. More specifically, it is told from the perspective of the Greek god Hermes, the cunning but kindly (at least in comparison to the other, meaner inhabitants of Olympus) messenger of the gods. As befits a novel so soaked in classical Greek culture, The Infinities displays Aristotle’s unities of time and place, covering a single midsummer’s day at Arden, the Irish countryside estate of famed mathematician Adam Godley. Adam has suffered a severe stroke and is currently in a coma (though we will learn in the course of the novel that he may be more conscious than his family supposes); his doctor expects him to die any day. Over the course of this particular day, Adam is visited at his bedside by his wife, Ursula, a patient soul who is also a closet alcoholic; Adam, Jr., his oldest son who, in his loyalty and gentleness, is compared to a golden retriever; Petra, his daughter and his favorite; and a strange figure named Benny Grace who Hermes tells us is really the goat-footed god Pan in human disguise.

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Ismail Kadare, an Albanian novelist with a long and distinguished career, writes with a dizzying, evocative style in the recently published The Accident. The novel has a constraining impact: it catches you up in worlds that don’t make sense, but which the novelist apparently forces open to meaning and that he then denies. This work, James Wood assures readers in the New Yorker (Dec.20 & 27, ’10), is almost too allegorical. This in itself is worrying, since its surface meaning is elusive and so makes any “allegorical” significance of the turns of plot less a tease than an equation in a form of higher literary mathematics, and that way beyond my ken. Even if there were answers at the back of the book, the solutions themselves would be unsatisfying.

An Albanian couple’s death in an “accident” forms the basis of an investigation by a researcher whose findings occupy the bulk of the narrative. The conclusions reached, intended to determine if the deaths were indeed accidental or really murders, are never conclusive. The haze of testimony and speculation inevitably mixes with the political changes in Albania and the Balkans, most particularly the war crimes surrounding Bosnia in the trials at the Hague.

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Clarence Clemons died on Saturday June 18. “Springsteen’s Soulful Sideman” the New York Times obituary called him.  He had a stroke the previous week and I remember hearing Bruce on the radio reassuring us that The Big Man would be all right.  My wife and I traveled over the week end. Monday morning I re-loaded and drove to the Outer Banks to see my son and daughter and their kids at the beach.  No news that week end. I never heard that Clarence had died.  Wednesday morning my son had to leave for home.  That night we were sitting around the house in Point Harbor when he called.  “Dad,” he said, “I have really bad news.”

That’s how I learned that the E Street Band’s larger than life saxophone player had died.  Clemons was best known for his massive onstage magnetism, in synergy with Springsteen, and for the haunting energy of his sax solos and tantalizing, allusive hooks on such standards as “Born to Run,” “Jungleland,” “Spirits in the Night,” “Rosalita,” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.”

I’ve never seen Bruce and the Band live in concert.  But I’ve driven thousands of miles with them keeping me awake and juiced to make it home.  In the fall of 1984, every Friday night, I would pop “Born in the USA” into the cassette player of my black Ford Escort and drive the length of the New Jersey Turnpike, past the Shore exits, from Maryland to my hometown of Tenafly, where my Dad was dying of cancer.  One of the last tracks on “Born in the USA” is called “Bobby Jean.”  It’s a song of deep sorrow.  Springsteen bids good bye to Bobby Jean and to much more.  It ends with a searing saxophone lamentation that gives sound to all the pain of loss.  I never listen to “Bobby Jean” unless I’m alone or with someone who knows me very well.  Such was the power of The Big Man’s gift.

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This weekend, July 15-16, Venice, Italy will celebrate its annual feast of the Redentore (the Redeemer) with fireworks, gondola races, concerts, and a public procession over a pontoon bridge built from one section of the city to another. From 1575-1577, Venice suffered from a plague that killed somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of its population. In 1577, the city commissioned the great architect Andrea Palladio to design and build a church dedicated to the Redentore, who saved the Venice from destruction. Although Palladio designed the church, he died in 1580; it was completed in 1592 by Antonio da Ponte. The church has been staffed by Capuchins since its dedication. It is a breathtakingly beautiful structure. It is certainly Palladio’s masterpiece.

The need for redemption surrounds Venice. Ecologically, the lagoon in which the city sits is under threat of rising seas. Demographically, the city’s population is now under 60,000, and it continues to fall. And there is even the need to be saved from the glorious chaos of the streets: the 20 million tourists annually (of whom, it seems 1,999,800 don’t speak Italian); the vaporettos (or waterbuses) filled to capacity; the gondoliers shouting “Gondola, gondola, hello” in the hopes of enticing customers; the merchants illegally selling handbags, sunglasses, or tchotchkas; the elderly Italians with sharp elbows who don’t wait in line. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I picked up a paperback copy of one of my absolute favorite books of 2010, Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector. The novel, which borrows its structure from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, tells the story of two twenty-something sisters, Emily and Jessamine Bach. Emily, a 28-year-old graduate of MIT, is the CEO of Veritech, a start-up company involved in data storage. She is smart, dispassionate, and engaged to another wildly successful (and, as it turns out, ruthlessly ambitious) internet entrepreneur; she has the sense. Jess, on the other hand, is a PhD. student in philosophy at Berkeley. She is also an environmental activist and romantic (unsurprisingly, Jess falls quickly and hard for the egotistical leader of a militant group devoted to saving the redwoods) who works part time at an antiquarian bookstore; she has the sensibility. Goodman interweaves the sisters’  narrative with events of great historical import: the boom and bust of the technology bubble and the September 11 attacks both play crucial roles in the plot of the novel. The Cookbook Collector is a fascinating look at a specific cultural moment and, more importantly, a rich portrait of two very good but ultimately flawed characters.

Yet this description fails to do justice to the imaginative power of Goodman’s work, and in particular to Goodman’s ability to convincingly imagine herself into a host of secondary characters. The Cookbook Collector treats an incredible number of minor characters seriously and at length: Jess’s boss, George, the curmudgeonly and handsome bookseller who turns out to be Jess’s true love; Emily’s fiance, Jonathan; his programming co-workers at the start-up ISIS; Emily’s personal assistant; even a Bialystok rabbi. For each of these characters, we are given access to personal histories and present predicaments; we see the ways in which each character negotiates the many moral dilemmas of a time flush with cash but ripe for catastrophe. The book requires a reader’s patience, the willingness to follow Goodman as she momentarily puts aside Emily and Jess to dilate upon other stories and other psychologies. Goodman sees each character, no matter how minor, as worthy of attention and sympathy.

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I’m starting with a long list of names but I need to in order to make my point. So, suppose you had encountered a new book on the Catholic Church by Michael Lacey or Francis Oakley or Joe Komonchak or Frank Sullivan or John Beal? What if it had been written by Gerard Mannion or Lisa Cahill or Cathy Kaveny or Charles Taylor? And how about Leslie Woodcock Tentler or Katarina Schuth? Or another sociological study by the indefatigable team of Bill D’Antonio, Jim Davidson, the late lamented Dean Hoge and Mary Gauthier? Wouldn’t you be excited to read what the book had to say?  Well, the bad news is that none of these folks has just published a new book, though I am sure some are impending, but the good news is that they are all featured in the 2011 Oxford University Press collection, The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, edited by Lacey and Oakley.

When I look at this collection and the truly formidable array of scholars who are its contributors I am inevitably reminded of the Yale conference back in 2003 that led to the outstanding book, Governance, Accountability and the Future of the Catholic Church (Continuum, 2003). The conference opened with an address by the then Archbishop Wuerl of Pittsburgh on the roots of Catholicism, more notable for its piety than for its willingness to grapple with the findings of scholarship. After a polite but distinctly challenging response from Peter Steinfels there came an array of distinguished scholars, many of them also included in this present 2011 volume, simply laying out the facts about the nature of governance and authority. Their conclusions contradicted those of the archbishop, who sadly had been unable to stay to hear what they had to say.

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Rebecca Goldstein (see my post of July 5) is not the only current author making much of Henry James. Colm Toíbín has been well-known for his interest in James, at least since his 2005 tour-de-force, The Master, a remarkable novelistic reading of James’s life. Actually, Toíbín’s interest long preceded the novel, and a collection of his essays on James appeared last fall (All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Johns Hopkins Press). There are also those who think that his 2010 novel, Brooklyn, is a kind of homage to Portrait of a Lady. The travels are in reverse—his heroine Eilis goes from Ireland to New York—but there is much to remind one of Isabel Archer, including two suitors, though not three.

Colm Toíbín’s love affair with Henry James continues this year in a new collection of short stories, The Empty Family. The first story, “Silence,” takes off from an entry in James’ notebook where he recounts an “incident” told him by a Lady G. In  Toíbín’s hands the Jamesian anecdote becomes Lady G.’s own story (Gregory, not Gaga), and James becomes a character within it, ending with her telling him the tale he will then put into his notebook. This may be a joke at James’ expense. The author who made huge books out of odd remarks and brief snatches of conversation scratches out in his journal a brief account of something that was really far more complex and consequential than he knew, and that could indeed have been the substance of one more great Jamesian novel. But instead it became the inspiration for a short story. Toíbín’s imagination picks up where James’ apparently, for once, failed him.

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Marian Ronan begins her short but provocative book, Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism (Columbia University Press), by asserting a truism: “For those of us who came to consciousness during and after Vatican II…the decline of the American church at the turn of the twenty-first century was almost incomprehensible…. Forty years earlier, the Second Vatican Council filled many of us with hope and expectation, but since then Mass attendance and financial support have declined steadily, the median age of priests and sisters has skyrocketed, and strife between and within Catholic communities has proliferated.” So far, so obvious.  While she agrees with John T. McGreevy that the sexual abuse crisis is “the single most important event in American Catholicism since Vatican II and the most devastating scandal in American Catholic history,” she thinks that the “distress” felt by her and many contemporary American Catholics “can [not] be attributed exclusively, or even primarily, to the clergy sexual-abuse crisis.” Rather, the symptoms of decline were clearly apparent long before the Boston Globe began its Pulitzer Prize-winning series on clergy sexual abuse in January 2002. The reasons for Ronan’s “distress” and that of many other American Catholics “are rooted, in part at least, in the dashed hopes and expectations of a significant portion of the American Catholic community after Vatican II and the inability of that community to acknowledge and work through those losses [italics mine].” That is the heart of the book, the psychological trope, largely discovered or rediscovered by Sigmund Freud in 1915: “mourning and the inability to mourn.” In a communal context, mourning and the inability to mourn “have to do with a people’s ability or inability to tolerate difference and change.”

Following sociologist Gene Burns, Ronan argues that the changes resulting from Vatican II “were more ambiguous than is often recognized.” Vatican II did not mitigate the monarchical structure defined at Vatican I. Rather, “it shifted the territory over which the pope claimed authority from the entire world to the arena of ‘faith and morals’…which means, for all intents and purposes, sexuality and gender.” For many American Catholics, influenced by “the apparent triumph of liberal American Catholicism at Vatican II,” “opposition to (or fierce support of) Catholic teaching on sexuality and gender has seemed the way forward, but,” concludes Ronan sadly, “the endless character of these battles suggests their futility. In Tracing the Sign of the Cross, I argue that the way forward instead involves grieving for our dashed hopes and expectations, in hope of a chastened but more productive future.”

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I’m in the midst of reading Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Booker-winning Wolf Hall. The novel offers an imaginative view into the court of Henry VIII, focusing its attention on Thomas Cromwell, the son of an abusive blacksmith who rose to become the king’s councilor and one of the driving forces behind his break with Rome. I don’t think the work is a masterpiece: while I admire Mantel’s careful psychological portraits of Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, and Cardinal Wolsey, the novel is oddly paced and its relentlessly driving narration–the whole thing is written in the present-tense, with short, staccato sentences dominating–can get overwhelming, as if we’re being assaulted by the past rather than absorbed into it. Still, it has been a great summer read, with lots of illicit passion and high-level brinkmanship. (I wish that Cromwell were at President Obama’s side during the debt ceiling negotiations—the wily councilor certainly wouldn’t have allowed the President to retreat so meekly.)

Reading Wolf Hall and thinking about Paul Lakeland’s post on Ron Hansen’s latest novel has got me wondering: why does it seem as if every “literary” novelist—I hate to use that term, but it will have to suffice—is writing historical fiction these days? Hansen, Tom McCarthy, Peter Carey, David Mitchell—these are some of the most original, inventive writers of contemporary fiction, and each has found recourse to that well-worn genre, historical fiction, within the last year or so. (You can read Commonweal reviews of historical novels by these authors here, here, here, and here.)

I have a few ideas about why these writers are finding bygone eras to be of such fertile fictional ground. First, they may be reacting against the legacy of high modernism, the great works of which (Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway) deemphasized plot and content, finding interest instead in subjectivity and pure form. Writing a historical novel almost necessarily means that you’re going to be interested in things like setting and objective narration—it’s hard to imagine a stream-of-consciousness novel set in the Tudor court—and so, in reclaiming the joys of setting and plot, perhaps writers like Mitchell are trying to distance themselves from a particular formalist tradition.

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My friend Robert Imbelli posted Garry Wills’s NYRB review of Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus’s All Things Shining on the main Commonweal blog a few weeks ago. [Here's Commonweal's review--subscribers only.] While I generally agree with the thrust of Wills’s review, the publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King offers the occasion to discuss another aspect of Kelly and Dreyfus’s argument.

Kelly and Dreyfus use Wallace’s fiction at the beginning of All Things Shining as an example of the nihilism of our contemporary secular age, and Wallace’s essay on Roger Federer appears near the end of their book as an example of finding meaning by getting “wooshed up” in what presents itself to us. The authors argue that Wallace’s fiction, like Melville’s and Homer’s, allows the gods to return and allows us to find the sacred in moments of everyday life. For example, Dreyfus and Kelly point to the absence of God in Wallace’s opus magnum Infinite Jest to show that Wallace did not think God, traditionally understood, could offer a sense of the sacred anymore. (No, God does not appear in Infinite Jest, but I think the authors miss that IJ is a deeply tragic piece of fiction. And so I don’t think the novel helps them make the point they think it makes.)

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Fifty-two years ago I was a starry-eyed English major hired at Commonweal to answer the telephone and to pound out—literally—correspondence on an old Smith-Corona.

Who could have imagined that the ties would still bind so many years later.

True, I sometimes feel like the comic relief. Not all writing needs to be Shakespearean, not all movies need the hand of a Bergman or Fellini.  Personally, I am an aficionado of well-done fluff.  But when I discover a diamond in the dung—and a good part of what passes for popular culture today is dung—I want to talk about it, to share my opinions.

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When I was in grad school working on a dissertation on Hegel, my director warned me that “Hegel is easy to get into, very hard to escape.” He should know. He’s still inside Hegel. However, I escaped Hegel. The one I cannot escape is Henry James, and I’m not even sure I want to. Of course, leaving the “large, loose, baggy monsters” (Edmund Wilson’s words, as I recall) of the later novels aside is relatively easy,  but the Master seems to keep showing up this summer, shadowing me in most everything I have been reading.

It started with Rebecca Goldstein, she of the recent thinking person’s best-seller (i.e., not on the Amazon top-ten lists), Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God. That book didn’t talk about Henry James at all, I believe, but treated the reader to an extraordinary comic character with remarkable affinities to Harold Bloom, both the physical attributes of large size and rumpled clothing, and the encyclopedic mind whose total recall makes it difficult at times to distinguish brilliant insights from plain old showing off. That led me back to Goldstein’s first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, where she combines comedy and Bildungsroman. The young female protagonist throws over mind for body, in the shape of a brilliant Princeton mathematician who rapidly proves that his mind is much more important to him than his (or her) body. Interwoven with the wit and the philosophy in both novels (Goldstein is a MacArthur fellow and author of a fine book on Spinoza) is a hankering over the traces of her Jewish heritage, seen at its best in a poignant meeting with an old Jewish couple in a secret corner of modern-day Budapest towards the end of The Mind-Body Problem.

So far, no Henry James. And then came Goldstein’s The Dark Sister, where Henry (and William) is much in evidence. This tells the story of two sisters, Hedda and Stella. Hedda is large and ungainly and lives a mostly eremitical existence in a tower, writing a novel about William James, supposedly in the style of his brother Henry. In the novel, William is engaged with another couple of sisters who in some ways mirror and in others contrast the Hedda/Stella couple. Goldstein, who is petite and attractive, shares Hedda’s obsession with William, as she informs the reader in a postscript, but also loves Henry. However, her passion for Henry is “focused entirely on his writing,” while that for William “is a thing far more personal.” Well, of course it would be. Henry, “the prissy virgin who wrote like an angel,” is all mind, while William is distinctly three-dimensional. Hedda is mind wanting to be body, Stella is body wanting to be mind, and Goldstein continues her explorations into how to balance the two. That, of course, requires William and Henry both. William is present as the object of Hedda’s novel. Henry is there in the Goldstein book but more evident in the way she plays with autobiographical traces in all her books. As Henry writes in his New York preface to The Ambassadors, “Art deals with what we see” and “plucks its material… in the garden of life,” but the process of art resides in “the literal squeezing-out of value,” where finding the story about which we want to write gives way to the much more difficult task of what to do with it.

Goldstein’s efforts to do precisely this deserve a larger audience.

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is one of the most polarizing films in recent memory. In his review in the New York Times, A. O. Scott immediately placed the film within the pantheon of great American art, comparing it to Melville’s Moby Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there have been numerous reports of moviegoers walking out midway through the enigmatic film and angrily demanding their money back. (It’s safe to say that The Tree of Life is the anti-summer blockbuster.) The Tree of Life has been praised as visionary, criticized as self-indulgent, even lauded for its visionary self-indulgence.

Regardless of whether one thinks The Tree of Life a masterpiece or a monstrosity, it is undeniable that Malick’s films, from Badlands (1973) onward, have forced us to rethink what film can and should be. Every Malick film has its own joys and perplexities. The New World (2005) remains my personal favorite—upon finishing the gorgeous retelling of the Pocahontas story for the first time, I immediately started watching the 150-minute movie over again. But the movie that has haunted me the most is Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978).

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Being something of a wimp, I avoid books about satanic serial killings, suffocation by pythons or other unappealing death scenarios. The mysteries I read are usually set in cities or in cozy English villages, but like most book lovers I am always on the prowl for something new and wonderful.

When I saw a blurb praising Craig Johnson, a writer who was new to me, I took a chance on The Cold Dish (Penguin, 400 pp, $14), his first book. The setting is Wyoming, in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains. High plains country, they call it, with isolated cabins and dangerous weather. But this book is amazingly free of wild animals. All the damage is done by humans.

Walt Longmire, the sheriff of Absaroka County, is a Western tough guy who reads Shakespeare and likes to reflect on things. There is a tenderness in his steel inner core, as if John Wayne had spent a couple of years at Harvard and then went to an ashram for good measure. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear, a Northern Cheyenne and the owner of the Red Pony Bar. “Vic” (Victoria) Morretti, his sexy, foul-mouthed chief deputy, is a refugee from south Philadelphia, unhappily married (how long can it last?), and devoted to her job.

The plot begins with the death of Cody Pritchard, a local ne’er-do-well. A few years earlier, Cody and three other teenaged boys had been convicted of a prolonged sexual attack on Melissa Little Bird, a young Cheyenne suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. The four are let off with the lightest possible sentence, leaving many people feeling that justice was not served.

Cody’s death seems a likely hunting accident, but the sheriff is bothered by an eagle feather found at the site. When a second young man from the group is found dead from a massive shotgun blast, Sheriff Longmire swings into action with dread in his heart. Is it possible that one of the local Cheyenne is taking revenge?

The author’s intimate knowledge of the Big Horn country–its towering and deadly beauty–gives the ordinary police work that follows, and the final blood-soaked manhunt, more than a touch of the spectacular. Mr. Johnson also provides a most satifying plot resolution. It developed right under my nose but is so skillfully disguised that I never saw it coming. This is probably because Mr. Johnson diverts and entertains with a bagful of local lore, such as how the Sharps rifle changed Custer’s fate at Little Big Horn.

I often judge characters in a book by whether or not I would like to have a drink with them. Mr. Johnson’s characters are indeed memorable and they would doubtless be excellent company over a can of Ranier Beer, the quaff of choice in Absaroka County. You should not be surprised to learn that I have already re-connected with Sheriff Longmire and his pals in Craig Johnson’s second book.

Ron Hansen’s latest novel is a real page-turner. Want another cliché? I couldn’t put it down. But I also couldn’t decide if it is really a novel or not. Hansen (Santa Clara University) has divided his work pretty much between re-imagining historical characters (Jesse James, Hopkins, and now the notorious Double Indemnity duo of 1920’s New York, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray), and finding his way through complex religious imaginations (Hopkins again, with the drowned nuns of The Wreck of the Deutschland and the absolutely unforgettable nun—mystic or hysteric?—of Mariette in Ecstasy). With the exception of Soeur Mariette all of the above have some historical purchase, and this latest perhaps most of all. The story of the doomed couple is well-known, has been the subject of other books and a movie or two, and was indeed written up in autobiographical form by both Snyder and Gray as they waited in Sing Sing for the judicial process to reach its conclusion. So it raises in particularly acute form the question about the kind of story that stands somewhere between the historical novel and the dramatized documentary: what do you do if the facts threaten to be more interesting than the fiction?

One of Hansen’s greatest gifts as a writer is to help readers feel their way into a time and place that is strange. All his work is set in unfamiliar places, though this latest is better-known, thanks to Hollywood. We know the world of Prohibition-era New York so very well, but the wealth of detail he adds provides a vivid background to the drama of sexual obsession and murderous fantasy become reality that moves the story along. Essentially, Hansen has worked backwards, imagining the “guilty passion” of Snyder and Gray from newspaper and book records of the times. If this novel reads like a True Crime story I suspect it is in part meant to do so, though there it is evidently written now and not then. We’re looking at this world through a telescope; it’s brought close to the reader, but we know that it’s far away. There’s great detail, but little psychologizing, comment on the state of mind of the two protagonists but no extended consideration of motives, blame, repercussions and so on.

I don’t want to suggest for a minute that this is not a book worth reading, but classifying it is a real puzzle. It is most definitely worth your time and attention for sheer enjoyment, and it says just enough about the relationship between the two principal characters to leave us room to think about why Judd did what he did and just what was going on in Ruth’s head. The problem may be that the drama is already relatively well-known, that maybe there is too much out there for a fictional account ever to become more than a brilliant elaboration of the story. It’s just not quite like Henry James spinning a tale out of a couple of lines of anecdote someone told him over one of his endless London dinners. Then the story is all, the original account just a little push to get the imagination flowing. Here we already know what happened and why, so the imagination is constrained by the ending to fill in the details, like an artist in a cartoon studio adding color to the black and white outline. Hansen’s previous book, Exiles, beautifully illustrates the challenge. In that work he flips back and forth between Hopkins’ life and the tragedy of the shipwreck of The Deutschland. Hopkins is so well-known that there is little room for the imagination, and that part of his story fell a little flat for me. But the nuns, that’s another story. Their lives and deaths are beautifully created because the author can. Neither we nor he know enough about their real lives or personalities to get in the way, as it were, of fully realizing them.

I have an unshakable memory of Charles Donahue, a professor of Ancient Germanic and Celtic literatures at Fordham University; this was over forty years ago. He was explaining to me, after a close reading of an Old English text, the nature of the heroic “boast” or brag, the preliminary challenge to the combat that was to follow between two Germanic warriors – as in Beowulf or the Finnsburg fragment. His face reddened, he intoned the words, and he spoke them with a passion that transformed him. He was the book, the age, the heroic ideal revisited. He stood then as an exemplar of what I have come to think of as a “man of the book.” He knew the classics, was an adept in traditional philology, and had an unassuming command of medieval literature and Celtic languages. The term “of the book” has had a peculiar resonance ever since then, implying an impossible (for me) level of erudition and thought. A man or woman like Charles Donohue has the learning and  experience to make reading virtually  a sacred act. Even if the work is secular, its study involves a discipline informed by humility, and naturally the scholarship that reveals links or patterns or revelatory associations. I think of him and others like him, as the scholar who lets the work speak, does not force meaning, and in the exceptional cases discovers, offering to others what is found.  I idealize here, I know, assuming that such reading is in itself chastening and causes an experience out of time, an escape to the “still point in the turning wheel.” There is a communion across eons, a fellowship of mind, of readers and writers that connects us to the ancients or not so ancients.  Undoubtedly the flesh still very much clings to the spirit behind such an act of reading, and all the fallibilities of the reader, the fallen human facts and facilities that we are, persist.

Those whom I have met  – teachers, lecturers, critics, and artists – who have had such discipline and humility are in turn humbling. They present what they have found, without condescension, speaking as with grace. Recently, I have tried to make sense of a scriptural scholar’s analysis of the poet and artist William Blake’s exegesis of the bible. This brought me up against both the depth of the reading of the contemporary critic and that of his focus, Blake himself.  I read commentary on commentary, and exegesis of exegesis. The body of an original text was cross-sectioned, reconnected and presented and then the procedure itself analyzed – Blake’s unity of word and image – and then interpreted. Such higher lever pursuits show the mind exploring itself yet not as in a narcissistic mirror but in the image of the maker whose humility seems to dis-limn self-regard.

Reading such people of the book, we witness a rare interplay, one that momentarily exists in what appears an absolute world. Perhaps this is what Augustine sensed when he watched as Ambrose read silently, not intoning the words or moving lips or tongue, as was the expectation of his time.  I have never doubted the “good,” indeed sacred nature of such reading nor the remarkable achievement of one who is “of the book.” The paradox, it seems to me, is that one cannot work to achieve such a reader’s stance. The transformative nature of the discipline is ingenuous – or perhaps I am simply offering a rationale for failure that is mine, to be “of the book.”