Category: Reviews

Free Fruit for Young Widows

He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.

Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation–one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis–and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story that brings abstract moral arguments down to concrete human terms.

Englander’s story would be memorable in any context, but especially so after a series of New Yorker stories that haven’t lived up to the standards of the magazine. (Was anyone else deeply disappointed by Doctorow’s Edgemont Drive, which was stilted, predictable, and not up to the standards of an undergraduate writing class? Were all the fiction editors on vacation that week?) I hope it’s an idicator of a better summer ahead.

Empire of Illusion

The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by the corporate titans. It is being paid in the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing town, and in depressed rural enclaves. This cost transcends declining numbers and statistics and speaks the language of human misery and pain.

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion is in part an angry screed, in part a Jeremiad lament, and (in small) part a vision of a better America. With a mixture of raw anger and sharp analysis, he covers a wide range of topics–professional wrestling, brutal pornography, the military-industrial-educational complex, the cozy relationship between journalism and power–and finds very little hope in the American landscape. All these topics are linked by the thesis that power in America is weilded less by elected government than by profit-seeking corporations, and that American culture has embraced a collection of illusions to mask this silent coup.

At its best, Empire of Illusion supports its thesis with devastating analysis: the circularity of media leaks that helped the Bush administration make the case for war in Iraq, the impact of globalization on workers in America and abroad that expose the myth of capitalism’s perpetual growth, the way pseudo-events distract the public from the truth. The topics are so wide ranging and tenuously connected, though, that it’s hard to follow the thread of Hedges’ argument through the entire book. What holds the book together more than logic is emotion, the righteous indignation at the blatant lies and distractions that the powerul use to maintain their power. Of course, righteous indignation was one of Aristotle’s virtues, and a little anger is more than called for in the cases Hedges brings to light; it runs the risk, though, of alienating rather than convincing readers who aren’t already in the choir.

The vision of the future that Hedges offers, following the economic and environmental implosions that even the most powerful illusions won’t be able to cover up, is especially grim:

A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites … will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft, abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of the security state.

It’s a vision that isn’t hard to imagine, given the anger and fear that has been churning in some quarters for the last decade. And without rational voices to counter the anger and fear, which have been painfully silent, it’s a frighteningly possible future.

Hedges does not, however, offer a concrete program to thwart such a future, and to reclaim democracy from corporate power. Empire of Illusion closes instead with a short hymn to love. “[N]o tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love. And this love–unorganized, irrational, often propelling us to carry out acts of compassion that jeopardize our existence–is deeply subversive to those in power.” And while I think that love is a fine answer to the world’s problems–my heroes tend to be Quakers, Buddhists, and pacifists–I find Hedges’ solution a bit thin after so much dystopia. If a counter thread of examples of the power of love had run through the book–not a maudlin Kumbaya, but the hard work of love in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Mother Jones–I would be more convinced. Instead, I came away from Empire of Illusion feeling a bit more uncertain in the future than I did going in.

The Slaves’ War

They stole away on a Sunday night . . . with her mother and another pair of slaves, and made the distance, more than fifty miles, to Fredericksburg, in fourteen hours, and Mr. Ballton declares they were not tired because they had something to walk for.

The Slaves’ War, Andrew Ward

Inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site, I’ve been trying to fill out my understanding of the Civil War this past month. I was a Civil War buff as a kid, and had the great good fortune of spending a summer moving from Maine to Kansas with my family, visiting as many Civil War battle fields along the way as we could. In graduate school I was exposed to some Civil War history–studies of Quaker and Methodist reactions to the war, quantitative histories of the economics of slavery, ante-bellum splits within Baptist churches over the morality of slavery. Until reading Andrew Ward’s book, though, I was largely ignorant of the people whose lives were most altered by the war.

Ward relies on interviews and written accounts of former slaves, many gathered through the WPA in the 1930s. Coates discusses the three sides of the war: Secessionists seeking to maintain slavery, Unionists seeking to maintain the Union, and slaves fighting for freedom. The voices in this collection represent what may be a fourth side: most of the accounts are from people who were unable to leave slavery during the war, who didn’t enlist in the Union army, and who were in many ways caught in the middle of great events over which they had very little control. There is a great deal of ambivalence in their stories: hopeful that the Union would prevail and free them, fearful that the war would make things worse on the plantations, sometimes personally loyal to masters and suspicious of the Northerners who cut a bloody path across the South, and finally bitter that liberty was not the prelude to equality that many had hoped for.

A complex portrait of slavery arises from the accounts Ward gathers. We hear the voices of field slaves, who are viciously worked on the plantations; slaves from the manor houses who have internalized the mores and habits of aristocracy; and urban slaves who have a strange and attenuated sort of liberty. The “Peculiar Institution” appears to be a sort of distributed totalitarianism, with its subjects kept in ignorance of the world around them, and great variation from owner to owner, and from year to year, in how the slaves’ daily lives are managed. It is also a system riven with internal contradictions: enforcing an ideology of white supremacy required tactics that implicitly recognized the slaves’ human potential, like prohibitions on literacy and communication.

The slaves’ accounts of the cruelties of slavery–not only the physical violence, but the merciless breaking up of families, the soul-crushing restrictions on news and travel, the constant fear and ignorance–are truly horrible. But what is also striking in these stories is the resolve that the slaves exhibit: they aren’t mere victims, but approach their lives with humor, wisdom, and candor.

Ward’s account of their lives after slavery is as harrowing as their lives before and during the war. Ward calls the Civil War “the Second American Revolution,” which surely it was: the cynical compromises that allowed the United States to be half free, half slave, came crashing down at Appomattox Courthouse. But it was an imperfect revolution, resulting in nominal liberty but not equality for the four million people freed by the war’s end. De facto re-enslavement was the experience of far too many freedmen, who were liberated with no attempt at reparation or justice. Coates’ “three sides” argument comes into stark relief in the last chapters of “The Slaves’ War”: the Secessionists lost, the Union was restored, and a shabby sort of freedom indeed was left in the wake of the war. This is a failure–a failure of planning, of vision, of justice–whose effects we suffer still, a century and a half after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Apparition and Late Fictions


Some days on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it.

Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch

These four elegiacal stories and one novella are about death, regret, death, loneliness, and death. Set largely in rural Michigan, and peopled by characters who have suffered loss or care for those who have, they have a slow and solemn pace. Lynch tends toward the long line, the slow and stately sentence, amplifying the adagio tempo.

Thomas Lynch is, not surprisingly, a funeral director by day; two of the stories–”Hunter’s Moon” and “Bloodsport”–are very explicitly about the business of burying, with much rumination about the changes in casket design over the last quarter century and the work of laying out a body for viewing and burial. And the stories that aren’t about funeral directors or casket salesmen have the disposition of remains as a key touchstone: a son takes his father’s ashes on a fishing trip, and a poet’s widow reflects on a stillbirth and how to care for her husband’s literary reputation. Though the novella, “Apparition,” isn’t so clearly about death, it is very much about loss, following a young pastoral assistant’s transformation from minister to self-help guru by way of infidelity and the collapse of his marriage.

Lynch works very successfully with time in these stories, moving deftly between the present and the past. The present action is largely within the characters’ heads; the real action occurs in the past, and in the way the past becomes reshaped in reflection. The stories unfold slowly and gracefully, and resolve with a sense of acceptance, if sometimes tinged with resignation. These are very grown-up stories, not unlike Thomas Williams’ Leah New Hampshire or William Kittredge’s collections, and put the reader in a reflective mood.

Every Man Dies Alone

Of course, Quangel, it would have been a hundred times better if we’d had someone who could have told us. Such and such is what you have to do; our plan is this and this. But if there had been such a man in Germany, then Hitler would never have come to power in 1933. As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann

More than 70 years on, there are still great gaps in our collective understanding of the Second World War, at least in the United States: we can easily conjure up D-Day, the Battle of Britain, and the liberation of the Nazi death camps; we can imagine the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the mushroom clouds over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But there are huge gaps: the Eastern Front is a mystery to most in the West, not just Americans, as are Manchuria, the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, even the war in the Balkans.

Even more so than the military events of the war, our knowledge of life and death on the home front is spotty at best. Through The Diary of a Young Girl and The Moon Is Down, we’ve learned a little about life in occupied Europe, but we generally know almost nothing about life in Nazi Germany itself. Every Man Dies Alone is, if nothing else, a valuable contribution to our understanding of history, with its densely drawn scenes of a working class neighborhood in Berlin during the Second World War and its sharp but humane view of daily life under the Nazis.

While reading Every Man Dies Alone, I was frequently reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. The Nazis maintain their power not only through brutality (and there is shocking brutality in this novel), but through paranoia: people are systematically divided from each other, made to fear that anyone–not only strangers and neighbors, but lovers and family members–could be a secret informer. Organized resistance to the regime seems almost impossible, and individual resistance both ineffectual and foolhardy. An atomized society, where people don’t dare reach out to each other or speak their minds, is both the ends and the means of the Nazi Party. There are also echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, where Nazi “justice” is presented as capricious and cruel, and the Gestapo as psychological manipulators who can twist the most innocent person into confessing impossible crimes.

What makes Every Man Dies Alone more terrible than Orwell and Kafka, though, is that it isn’t wholly a work of fiction. The novel is based on the case of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who dropped anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin for two years and were executed in 1943. Hans Fallada survived internment in a Nazi asylum, and the novel demonstrates his intimate knowledge of Nazi police and prisons, as well as the network of petty informants and tattlers who helped keep the regime in power. It’s a surprisingly non-ideological novel: the Quangels, who lost their son in the war and are driven to their desperate act of resistance by grief, are not motivated by political or social goals loftier than common decency. And few of the Nazis they encounter and evade are true believers, either: they tend to be thugs or petty potentates driven by power, or decent men who have made painful compromises from which they cannot now escape. Fallada brings the broad sweep of history down to an intimate scale, and offers complex characters who are making their way in brutal circumstances.

As a novel, Every Man Dies Alone suffers a few flaws. It relies on some Dickensian coincidences that stretch the suspension of disbelief, and drops a few story threads just as they’re getting interesting. But these flaws are more than balanced by the richness of the characters. Fallada manages to make even the would-be informant Enno Kluge, and the Gestapo Inspector Escherich (who, in a different time and place, would have made a fine police-procedural hero), into sympathetic characters. The heroes themselves are not perfect–Otto Quangel is emotionally cold and domineering, retired judge Fromm is in retreat from the world–which makes their ability to stand up to the Nazis, however fruitlessly, that much more admirable. It’s also a fast-moving novel, paced like a thriller even when the end is a foregone conclusion (hinted at from the start), told mostly in the present tense with the focus moving nimbly from character to character.

Fallada died in 1947, before Every Man Dies Alone was published. It would be interesting to have had Fallada’s views on the next chapter of Berlin’s history: the Quangels’ apartment block on Jablonskistrasse ended up on the east side of Wall, and the neighborhood had a respite of only a few years before paranoia, fear, and suspicion flooded back, with the Stasi replacing the Gestapo. Knowing how the next forty years would go makes reading Fallada’s novel especially poignant.

a year in reading, 2009

I didn’t do a lot of new-release reading this year: the budget didn’t allow for splurging on books, and the library hold queue for the season’s hot titles was often quite long. But the world of good books is timeless, and there’s no reason that an annual “best of” list should be confined to an arbitrary calendar year. Here are five books I read and loved in 2009.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada


The best book I read this year was also the last one I read (indeed, it carried over a few days into the new year). Every Man Dies Alone was originally published in Germany in 1947, but only appeared in a U.S. edition, from Melville House Press, this year. It tells the story of a working-class Berlin couple who quietly risk their lives to resist the Third Reich by dropping anti-Nazi postcards around the city. It’s a grim and gritty book, full of brutal and nasty characters, but it’s also a story of great courage and decency, and highlights a chapter of World War II–life within the Nazi regime itself–about which precious little is told in the West.

Stoner by John Williams


Like Every Man Dies Alone, Stoner is a novel of resistance, decency, and dignity, but in a much quieter setting. It tells the story of a farm boy who becomes an English professor at a midwestern university; inspired by the love of language, he struggles with love, politics, and family, apparently accomplishing little of value to the world but much of value to the life of the mind.

The Music of Failure by Bill Holm


The Music of FailureWe lost Bill Holm, essayist, poet, and Prairie philosopher, in February, precisely at the time that we needed his particular perspective the most. His first collection of essays, The Music of Failure, sets the theme for much of his work; it approaches the American Dream from the experiences of Icelandic immigrants on the Minnesota prairie who have apparently failed in so many ways–they die poor, unsung, and forgotten–but turns the Dream on its head in celebrating their quiet strength. There’s a rootedness to Holm’s work, a there-ness and place-ness, that is a powerful antidote to blind ambition; if more people were strong and quiet failures, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Four Stories by Sigrid Undset


These stories, published in Norwegian at the turn of the 20th century, are like a cool drink of water: graceful, clear, and spare. The subject matter is reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen, but is handled with a wit, tenderness, and generosity that is uniquely Undset’s.

The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno


The Great PerhapsJoe Meno deftly blends satire, fantasy, and realism in this story of clouds, squids, and an unraveling family; this was one of the most inventive novels I’ve read in a long time, peopled with believable, flawed, and compelling characters.

In the Year of Long Division

We looked out from indoors. Nose to glass, we looked, fogging, we looked, through the damp of our exhalations, downstairs, upstairs, piggyback–we saw scenes through see-through curtains, a shadow boxing with a shade, something bubbled, tubside–every which we could find to look, we did; one and the other, and once–or was it twice?–both, in a wash, shriveled and skin-shedding, soaked in looks of bathroom-window-frosted boy. Rings ringed the tub. We left smudges in our wake of who knew what.

In the Year of Long Division, Dawn Raffel

The stories in In the Year of Long Division show the ultimate end of the minimalist impulse: prose becomes poetry, external description subordinated to an internal dialogue, scenes sketched so lightly they become feathery suggestion. It is perhaps no surprise that Raffel calls out her thanks to Gordon Lish at the beginning of her acknowledgements: this is the short story shorn of traditional plot and character as was only hinted at in Raymond Carver’s work.

At its best, this style of storytelling is hypnotic and incantatory. Raffel uses the tools most associated with poetry: repetition, meter, and close attention to the feel as well as the meaning of words mark stories like “In the Year of Long Division,” “We Were Our Age,” and “Somewhere Near Sea Level.” Short sentences and phrases pile up into long, complex structures, and the reader is carried along on the flow of rhythm. The most memorable stories in the collection are told from a child or young adult’s viewpoint, and the elusive style closely matches the misprisions and confusions of adolescence: the central consciousness doesn’t quite understand what’s going on, and we share in that uncertainty.

Other stories, though, are less well-served by the style. Try as I might, I couldn’t quite make sense of “The Seer” or “City of Portage,” even after several readings; there wasn’t enough structure on which to hang the striking images and language to support a narrative sense. “The Trick” and “Table Talk” feel like Carver stories stripped of setting, and lose emotional impact for their lack of concreteness.

This collection is best read the way you would a collection of poetry: slowly, carefully, with long pauses between stories. The experience is rewarding and disorienting, in the way the best poetry can be, and is also demanding like poetry: Raffel’s stories are not for the distracted reader. Her voice is distinctive, though, and her use of language wonderfully disturbing; expect to be haunted by her rhythms and repetitions long after you turn the last page.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

… they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their client directs them to. … They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well-adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is less about work than it is about the extremes of specialisation in the modern economy. In ten loosely linked essays, de Botton follows the path of a tuna from the Indian Ocean to a plate in Bristol, the invention and manufacture of a snack biscuit, the launch of a Japanese television satellite, and the intricacies of a large accounting firm. Along the way de Botton casts light on facets of our economic lives that, owing to our own participation in the ever-finer subdivision of labor, we rarely have the opportunity to reflect upon. Accompanied by Richard Baker’s stark and often strangely beautiful photographs of warehouses, electric pylons, and office buildings, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an equally insightful and exasperating tour of how the world functions.

I say exasperating because the book is informed by a philosophy of work which is only briefly enunciated, and largely unexamined. De Botton draws a thread from Aristotle through Christian doctrine and the Enlightenment, and on to current self-help nostrums expounded by career counselors; it represents a distorted view of work and why we do it.

In the fourth century BC, Aristotle clarified the attitude that was to last more than two millennia when he referred to a structural incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position. For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals.
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Early Christianity appended to Aristotle’s notion the still darker doctrine that the miseries of work were an appropriate and immovable means of expiating the sins of Adam.

This view of work was challenged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, particularly by Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encylodédie, “a paean to the nobility of labour” which sought to raise the “mechanical” arts to the level of the “liberal” arts. “[T]he European bourgeoisie took the momentous step of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically–or perhaps realistically–confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affai and the hobby.”

De Botton’s approach is informed by this conflict between the Aristotelian and the bourgeois, with his sympathies apparently with the aristocratic position. He expects to find his subjects subscribing to the bourgeois expectations of deriving meaning from their work, which leads him to be disdainful of the tightly proscribed spheres in which they find their purpose. How, he wonders, can ultimate meaning be found in the design of cookie advertisements, the minutia of financial audits, and the clockwork science of logistics? The workaday world of contemporary capitalism demands such narrow specialisation that surely all meaning has been drained out of work; souls that find meaning within these narrow confines must be severely stunted in comparison to the Greek philosophers, medieval craftsmen, and gentleman hobbyists of yore.

This is a well-traveled path: I think in particular of Marx on alienation (especially in the Grundrisse), Weber’s “iron cage” of capitalism and bureaucracy, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, as well as the early (pre-Lockean) conservative critique of capitalism. But it is also a very narrow and elite notion of where work fits into the full human life. In tracing that path from Aristotle to self-actualization through work–two sides of the same coin, I would argue–de Botton ignores the experience of the vast majority of men and women who have had to work to survive, and the strategies they have found to balance necessity and purpose. The amount of meaning we can, do, and should derive from our work is an unsettled question.

When I examine my own life, I find that the things from which I get the most pleasure (and sorrow)–parenting, reading, writing–are decidedly non-remunerative; indeed, the paid work that I do is an attempt to fund those other activities. The hours I spend working for pay are not devoid of meaning, though; I’ve been lucky to find work that I often find enjoyable and challenging, even if it is not incredibly fulfilling. I fully expect none of the software projects I’ve been part of to outlive me, much less become monuments for the ages. This perspective does not preclude pride in a job well done, or even passionate opinions about how a project should be implemented. A pleasure that I find in my work, and which I share with de Botton’s accountants, rocket engineers, and biscuit bakers, is to see my efforts change the world, even in a very tiny way: we are, after all, homo faber, the makers of our own environment, and even in the current stage of capitalism we can face down alienation by seizing control of our proscribed spheres.

De Botton seems unwilling, in his focus on the extremes of the division of labor, to grant his subjects the dignity they’ve fashioned for themselves. Ultimate meaning may not be derived from their work, and due to the book’s focus we get few glimpses of the sphere where meaning is actually found in their lives; but surely some value is to be found in the enthusiasm these people show for their work.

This is not to say that The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is entirely condescending, nor that the philosophy underpinning it taints the entire book. This is an insightful book as well, after all, and there is much to learn and ponder in it. The chapter on logistics, and the photo essay following a tuna from its brutal death to consumption by a boy who “hates tuna, but not as much as he hates salmon,” illuminates the processes that alienate us from the sources of all the commodities in ourr lives. The vignettes that bookend the chapter on accountancy could be descriptions of Edward Hopper paintings, with their unbearable longing and loneliness.

De Botton also has some interesting things to say about the sublimation of desire as a necessary function of the modern workplace:

Superficially, the [sexual harassment] code seems wholly and admirably concerned with championing the rights of innocent parties. There may, however, be a more cynical and less altruistic aspect to this unsparing paragraph, for what is really being protected is perhaps not a particular individual afflicted by indecent attention so much as the corporation itself. The feelings elicited by Katie’s shorts are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the firm’s entire rationale. They risk bringing to light an awkward truth: how much more interesting we might find it to have sex than to work.

As an examination of the invisible girders, both physical and ideological, that support the modern economy, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is insightful and intriguing. I’ve become increasingly conscious of the trucks and wires that keep my grocery store stocked and my lights burning, and curious about the barges on the Mississippi since reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. But as an exploration of how we make sense of the world we’ve made, and how we negotiate work’s meaning in our lives, de Botton brings a bit too much baggage on the journey.

Voices Fom the Moon

You know why I like my waitress friends so much? And what I learned from them? They don’t have delusions. So when I’m alone at night–and I love it, Larry–I look out my window, and it comes to me: we don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.
Voices From the Moon, Andre Dubus

I have a theory–thoroughly untested, and probably wrong–that you can identify a novel written by a master of the short story by its use of the close third-person point of view. Where novelist-novelists might choose a more omniscient voice, flitting from consciousness to consciousness, or a point of view limited to the exterior, seeing only what the camera’s eye can pick out, the story-novelist settles into a character’s head and stays a while, letting their thoughts color whole chapters. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter comes to mind as such a novel, with its strong interior portraits of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale; and Andre Dubus’ Voices From the Moon is another.

Voices From the Moon is told in nine chapters, the focus shifting between six characters. It’s classic Dubus territory: Greg is going to marry Brenda, his son Larry’s ex-wife; Dubus explores this uncomfortable situation’s effects on Greg’s young son Richie, his grown daughter Carol, his own ex-wife Joan, as well as the three principals in the triangle. They are all flawed and troubled in their own ways, doing damage to one another while trying desperately not to; Dubus presents them with his typical affection and care, giving each at least one chapter in which we get to inhabit their minds.

The narrative slips back and forth over the course of a day, with the same conversations retold from each point of view. Nothing much happens by way of action–it’s very much a novel of relationships and emotion–but it is still incredibly rich and gracefully told. The characters revisit their own pasts, and the pasts they shared with the people they loved, and struggle to negotiate a path into a bearable future. We see inside a young boy’s hopes and fears (Richie wants to be a Catholic priest, but feels stirrings of love for a girl) as well as a middle-aged man’s regrets and dreams (Greg wants to travel the world, explore the Amazon, but is haunted by his failed and failing relationships). Each character, to use the religious imagery that pervades Richie’s chapters, struggles to identify the cross they must bear while figuring out how best to carry it.

Voices From the Moon is more properly, I suppose, a novella than a novel. At just over 120 pages, it’s not much longer than “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Adultery,” two of Dubus’ better-known stories. The novella form lends itself well to the talents of a short story writer: sustained and distinct voices, close observation of detail, and echoes that build subtly into a chorus are better absorbed in a small package than a sprawling one. Like short stories, novellas require more focus from the reader than do larger novels: start to skim a few pages, and you’ll miss key moments very quickly. Voices From the Moon rewards that sort of attention with a generous and humane collection of portraits.

Pieces for the Left Hand

Tiny Upstate town
Undergoes many changes
Nonetheless endures.
“Brevity,” from Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon

The 100 anecdotes collected in Pieces for the Left Hand are loosely held together by a setting (a small upstate New York town and its environs) and a narrative consciousness (an unemployed man who muses on these tales as he takes a daily walk). All are very brief–none more than three pages–and most have a gnomic or aphoristic quality. They touch on themes of mistaken identity, the pitfalls of memory, and unanticipated consequences, often refusing to come to a clear resolution.

In many ways, they resemble some of Kafka’s shorter pieces: they take place in a world much like our own, though slightly askew, and leave the reader with a feeling of uneasiness. Good intentions are frequently thwarted: a professor who debunks a bogus Viking obelisk is vilified while the hoaxer becomes a hero; a man who unwittingly dismisses a phantom laundry folder becomes a pariah when he tries to carry on the anonymous act of kindness. Identity is slippery: two professors carry on a feud over the spelling of “gray” or “grey,” continuing to argue even when they switch sides. Nothing is quite what it seems, but even when the truth is revealed it doesn’t resolve the anecdotes’ questions.

The title suggests an off-handedness to the stories, though they are in fact tightly written, highly controlled exercises. Lennon’s writing is evocative and restrained, with a note of bemusement pervading the anecdotes. Like miniature sketches, they imply much more than they state; though the impulse is to read the collection quickly, popping the little nuggets like bonbons, Pieces for the Left Hand deserves to be sipped slowly, like poetry or a fine port wine, letting the suggestions sink slowly into the reader’s consciousness.

The Graywolf Press paperback edition is another example of a book that works well as a physical object. The cover art shows a paint-by-numbers man (one assumes each numbered squiggle represents an anecdote) walking through a wintry landscape. This figure is echoed in the lower right corner of the odd pages, making a flip-book animation of the narrator’s circumgyrations. Try doing that, Kindle!

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