Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels, and taking with them many excellent writers. And by and large, it’s delivering the same rewards to its audience. But what about novels that exploit the opportunities that are available only to the form of the novel, such as novels that explore interiority, or rely on the novel’s versatile treatment of time and causation? Who will speak for such novels?
Books
Fred Bass, Maestro of the Strand
The news this week of the death, at age eighty-nine, of Fred Bass, the legendary bookseller who made the Strand into the cultural landmark it is, put me in mind of an afternoon I spent with him more than a decade ago. I had gone to the Strand to learn something about the store’s highly-trafficked used-book buying counter, and the people who worked there. It was a place with which I had a more than passing familiarity. Like any number of young literary-minded New Yorkers with more ambition than money (or storage space), I had long made the trek to 12th Street and Broadway, my satchel laden with review copies. There was something ignoble in this, but it was an authentic part of a hoary, if not frequently discussed, literary tradition.
1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder
Until the calamities of 1939−45 prompted a name change, what we now call World War I was known as either the Great War or, wishfully, the War to End All Wars. A century later, it looks more like the true Mother of All Wars, including how its Ottoman Empire sideshow — a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia and all that — created the modern Middle East. This may explain why the big cataclysm’s centennial commemorations from 2014 on have been so short on zest.
We don’t much mind honoring gory history so long as its upheavals feel safely remote from civilization’s settled, confident present. That’s hardly the situation here, though — not with the prospect of another showdown as mindless as the one set off by Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914 crisping the air everywhere from Donald Trump’s Washington to Pyongyang and Tehran. No longer a quaint business featuring spike-helmeted kaisers, khaki puttees, herky-jerky silent films, and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” World War I looks increasingly like our own anxious era’s origin story.
Welcome to the overarching premise of Arthur Herman’s 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. It stands out in the glut of revisionist histories timed to World War I’s 100th anniversary, not least because it’s a terrific read. Even when you want to quarrel with Herman’s interpretations, he’s a whiz at organizing his complicated materials for maximum narrative clarity and dramatic effect. His provocative pairing of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s inventor, with Woodrow Wilson, the most intransigently high-minded of U.S. presidents, as the joint architects of the chaotic planet we know today is never boring, no matter how irritated you may be by his ambition to turn “Tommy and Volodya” (one of his breezier chapter titles) into unwitting kindred spirits.
The way they’re portrayed here, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say there are moments when only Lenin’s goatee and Wilson’s silk topper will keep you able to tell them apart. Lenin struggled to turn post-Romanov Russia into the unlikely starter wife for his fantasy of worldwide proletarian revolution, while Wilson, maybe even more imaginatively, tried to repurpose the Western Front’s barbaric slaughter into an abolition movement against the wickedness that had led to it in the first place. Both were, in Herman’s view, radical zealots, equally determined “to transform events . . . in ways that would make those events consistent with their larger vision.” Even though neither man’s vision prevailed in the long run — that’s how it goes with visions — 1917 amounts to a prosecutor’s brief against both on a charge of shared messianic absolutism.
Except, perhaps, among a few diehard Communist dotards, the deleterious effects of Lenin’s ideas aren’t in much dispute. Once the Bolsheviks secured power, an outcome far from guaranteed when the famous German-sponsored train transporting Lenin from Swiss exile chugged into Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, his ruthless conflation of patriotism and party loyalty laid “the essential foundation of the totalitarian state.” Not only Mussolini and Hitler, but Mao Zedong and, in our time, Kim Jong-un, owe Lenin’s example for making their variants on it possible.
Dispelling any lingering sentimentality about where the Marxist dream went wrong, Herman does a first-rate job of demonstrating that Stalin’s USSR — gulag, show trials, vulpine secret police, and all — was by no means a travesty of Lenin’s blueprint but its fulfillment. (“Yes, we are oppressors,” Lenin once bluntly said, because revolutions with no real popular backing can’t work any other way.) However, Wilson doesn’t really come off much better, at least aside from Herman’s acknowledgment that Lenin’s embrace of murderous violence would have horrified him.
You don’t have to be much of an admirer of our twenty-eighth president — and who is anymore, except a few diehard Princetonian dotards? — to think there were plenty of other significant differences. One of them is that, even at its most vainglorious, Wilson’s project — unlike Lenin’s — didn’t include the destruction of representative democracy to help realize his goals. He merely had a temperament amazingly ill suited to democracy’s give-and-take, which comes under the heading of personality flaws and not crimes against humanity.
That’s why there’s a certain underhanded brilliance in comparing Wilson to Lenin so relentlessly. No liberal himself — his current home base is the right-wing think tank the Hudson Institute, and he’s a regular contributor to the likes of Commentary and National Review — Herman is a man on a mission he plainly delights in: doing his bit to discredit the liberal tradition by giving one of the Democratic Party’s bygone paragons feet of clay that reach, in Wilson’s case, right up to his pince-nez. It doesn’t even matter that Wilson is hardly a hero to the Woke Generation, as white supremacists with a virtuous hankering to impose America’s will abroad aren’t popular campus figures these days. Linking twentieth-century American liberalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism is an old game among conservative intellectuals, but Herman’s originality is all in personalizing things by rooting his case in the similarity of Lenin’s and Wilson’s psychological makeup and depicting both as fanatics.
If that requires playing fast-and-loose with ideological categories on occasion, Herman certainly goes about it nimbly. Among other ploys, he habitually identifies Wilson as a capital-P “Progressive,” not merely a Democrat; while Wilson himself wouldn’t have objected to the label, Herman rather scurries past the fact that it was a catchall term for reformists back then, with prominent proponents in both parties. The effect is to make unwary modern readers see Wilson as much more of a left-winger than he was, setting up broad-brush claims on the order of Herman’s sweeping assertion that Wilson saw the war as an opportunity “to realize his Progressive dream of a nation that responded to the agenda and needs of government — as opposed to the other way around.” (Really? How very Leninist of him.) On the flip side, Herman breezily equates the Bolsheviks’ creation of a state security apparatus to enforce ideological conformity with “what would come to be called ‘political correctness,’ ” which is really pretty disgraceful as drive-by calumnies go.
In other words, you’d do well to take his more extreme elaborations of his schema with roughly a pound of salt. That frees you up to enjoy his book’s considerable virtues, from its lively storytelling — lots of quasi-cinematic cross-cutting between capitals — and zesty plunges into the intricate political maneuverings that Lenin ruthlessly mastered and Wilson obstinately held himself above, to Herman’s frequently acute insights into how both men’s minds worked. If he’s at his weakest, not to say shoddiest, when he’s trying to turn his leading actors into funhouse-mirror soul mates — their diametrically opposed understanding of the machinery of power is enough all by itself to demolish that notion — he’s much more convincing when he’s plumbing them separately as individuals and giving the manufactured parallels a rest.
Herman’s portraits of the other key players in 1917‘s vast canvas are often stimulating as well. Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks overthrew, emerges here as a more impressive, less feckless figure than the sad sack of caricature — a man, in fact, with the gifts to have emerged as “the George Washington of the new Russia” if Lenin’s greater wiliness hadn’t thwarted him. (Charmingly, Herman mentions that he once met Kerensky, who didn’t die until 1970, in the latter’s old age.) A good deal less persuasively, Herman blames Wilson for dooming Kerensky’s government by not pressuring his new European allies to end the war before Russia collapsed, a scenario that evaporates in the face of Britain’s and France’s likely reaction to the proposal.
He’s on surer ground assessing how Wilson’s hauteur checkmated him politically at home. Clearly a much bigger fan of Theodore Roosevelt’s boisterous conception of the United States as an emerging world power than he is of Wilson’s maddeningly lofty version, Herman argues that Wilson’s rejection of Roosevelt’s eager offer to raise a division of volunteers to fight on the Western Front — which most historians treat as a well-deserved rebuke to the former president’s bellicose vanity — was actually one of his key mistakes, making an enemy out of not only T.R. but his Senate ally Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge, of course, ended up as the man chiefly responsible for torpedoing American participation in the League of Nations, Wilson’s ultimate dream.
Nonetheless, by ultimately bringing the United States into the war, Wilson did launch us on the road to becoming a world hegemon, even if that status wasn’t certified until the end of World War II. From Herman’s perspective, this was a more or less unqualified “Good Thing,” putting him in the odd position of giving Wilson credit for letting the genie out of the bottle, after spending several hundred pages castigating him for confusing genies with the Holy Ghost. Trying to reconcile the public relations value of Wilsonian idealism with the Kissinger-style Realpolitik he obviously prefers in practice makes his concluding pages fairly convoluted, but most readers will have caught on well before then that the pleasures of 1917 are in its energy and detail, not its ambitious but bungled aspirations to big-picture profundity.
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Can Trump Obstruct Justice?
The constitutional standard for an impeachable offense—“treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—is best understood to require serious official misconduct, but not the commission of a crime. But since Alan Dershowitz’s view implies that any presidential termination of an investigation is constitutionally authorized, impeachment for such an action could not be legally permissible. The dispute over this view is no abstract, academic debate. As a matter of practical politics, a long-running controversy among legal experts on this point could give political cover to Republican members of Congress to resist taking up an obstruction charge.
The B&N Podcast: James Lee Burke
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
James Lee Burke’s literary triumph was long in coming — but once he introduced New Orleans detective Dave Robicheaux in the 1987 novel The Neon Rain, he quickly became both one of the most acclaimed American crime writers, and an irreplaceable chronicler of the Crescent City’s unique culture and history. His latest novel, titled simply Robicheaux, returns his beloved but battled-scarred hero to a murky world where business, politics and crime intersect. In this episode, James Lee Burke talks with Bill Tipper about his love of New Orleans and the long strange road to becoming an American classic.
James Lee Burke’s most beloved character, Dave Robicheaux, returns in this gritty, atmospheric mystery set in the towns and backwoods of Louisiana.
Dave Robicheaux is a haunted man.
Between his recurrent nightmares about Vietnam, his battle with alcoholism, and the sudden loss of his beloved wife, Molly, his thoughts drift from one irreconcilable memory to the next. Images of ghosts at Spanish Lake live on the edge of his vision.
During a murder investigation, Dave Robicheaux discovers he may have committed the homicide he’s investigating, one which involved the death of the man who took the life of Dave’s beloved wife. As he works to clear his name and make sense of the murder, Robicheaux encounters a cast of characters and a resurgence of dark social forces that threaten to destroy all of those whom he loves. What emerges is not only a propulsive and thrilling novel, but a harrowing study of America: this nation’s abiding conflict between a sense of past grandeur and a legacy of shame, its easy seduction by demagogues and wealth, and its predilection for violence and revenge. James Lee Burke has returned with one of America’s favorite characters, in his most searing, most prescient novel to date.
See more books by James Lee Burke.
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Being Chris Ware
Ware has a deadpan self-abnegation that is, by all accounts, genuine. But in such an enormous book as this, which is fairly bursting with photographs of his accomplishments and friends, and all the amazing drawings documenting his rise from lonely, fatherless child to fifty-year-old genius, it does seems a terrific struggle to keep the humble pie hot through 275 pages. About halfway through, Ware’s aw-shucks attitude became, at least for me, hard to take. He needn’t be so abashed about all he has done.
Lauren Greenfield’s Gilt Edge
Greenfield’s raw material, materialism, is candy-colored and stimulating. It is also almost uniformly depressing. In “Generation Wealth,” she shows us the self-starved bodies of the affluent young, among their parents’ magma-flow of possessions. We see their marmoreal homes, their beauty regimes, and their fathers’ younger, heliotropic second wives. The overall affect of the exhibition’s packed two floors and the accompanying book, a dense gold brick with some 650 images, is nihilism. At times, it even feels gleefully so.
Murderous Majorities
Majoritarian politics results from the patiently constructed self-image of an aggrieved, besieged majority that believes itself to be long-suffering and refuses to suffer in silence anymore. The cultivation of this sense of injury is the necessary precondition for the lynchings, pogroms, and ethnic cleansing that invariably follow.
At War with a Story: The Uncanny Fiction of Barbara Comyns
There’s an insidious mood found in the novels of Barbara Comyns, an unsettling evocation of that place where the familiar falls away and reveals the uncanny, the supernatural, and the unknown. Over the course of her 1954 novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead — whose title gives a sense of the dread conveyed in its pages — the members of a family slowly give in to a pernicious madness that spreads like disease, turning the novel’s invocation of the pastoral charms of the English countryside into something far more menacing.
Comyns’s 1959 novel The Vet’s Daughter explores the tense relationship between a father and a daughter, but it’s laced with the latter’s supernatural abilities. By the time of the novel’s climax, they accelerate the book — which has previously fallen largely into the “chamber piece” category — into full-blown gothic horror, the repressed suddenly coming to the forefront, a host of menaces in tow.
For those unfamiliar with Barbara Comyns’s work, it’s not misleading to compare her with Shirley Jackson: both explored ambiguous spaces between psychological realism and hallucinatory revenants; both also excelled at traveling into the minds of troubled young women possessing strengths and dangers in equal measure. And like Jackson’s, Comyns’s work has plenty of contemporary champions: in a 2014 interview in The Guardian, Helen Oyeyemi spoke of her admiration for Comyns’s 1962 novel The Skin Chairs; and in 2010, Brian Evenson wrote the introduction for a new edition of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.
But to simply file Comyns among the practitioners of the deeply weird and the subtly uncanny is to miss something about her work. She was also capable of writing a gut-wrenching story in a realist vein: consider the 1950 novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, in which she wrote frankly about a woman falling out of love with her husband and experiencing the devastating effects of chronic poverty. (It’s not for nothing that the introduction to NYRB Classics’ recent edition is by Emily Gould, whose fiction excels in astute observations of how class inflects the dynamics of love and friendship.)
The Juniper Tree (1985) was the first of three novels Comyns published in the 1980s, before her death in 1991. It occupies a fascinating position in its relationship to both the fantastical and the mundane. It’s a realistic story about a single mother trying to make the best of her life in London and, eventually, navigating a troublesome marriage; it’s also an adaptation of a fairy tale — an Ur-story that takes on its own increasingly powerful role in the characters’ lives.
“My mother she killed me, / My father he ate me,” goes the song contained in the fairy tale “The Juniper Tree.” It’s an obviously unsettling piece of verse; it’s one where the voice is resigned to its fate, and it’s one in which the familial and the horrific are fully intertwined. It’s not for nothing that an award-winning anthology of contemporary fairy tales from 2010, edited by Kate Bernheimer, used this as its title.
In the case of Comyns’s novel, it serves as the epigraph and hangs disconcertingly over the proceedings, signaling that something terrible is on the horizon. Which isn’t to say that the novel doesn’t have plenty of ugliness from the outset: protagonist Bella Winter is a single mother doing her best to provide for her daughter, Marline, and make a living for herself. Marline is biracial; Bella’s mother, who can barely contain her racism (and sometimes doesn’t), is of no help to the family and frequently alienates both her daughter and granddaughter.
An early glimpse of Bella’s adolescence puts that bond into sharp focus, helps establish the novel’s theme of flawed parent/child relationships, and gives a great sense of Bella’s narrative candor.
My mother was the games mistress at a local school which I attended. At first the girls teased me and called me “teacher’s pet,” but when they saw how she treated me the teasing ceased.
Bella’s father abandoned the family when his daughter was young, causing a lasting rift between mother and daughter and setting this flawed familial dynamic in motion.
Early on, Bella’s situation seems dire: she struggles with poverty, and she bears the literal scar of an old relationship: a mark on her face that resulted from an auto accident caused when she was out for a drive with a former boyfriend. Slowly, her circumstances improve: she finds a job working at a shop and discovers that she’s quite good at it. It’s through that job that she meets and befriends Gertrude Forbes and her husband, Bernard, an affluent couple who live nearby. If Bella’s mother is a case study in alienating behavior, Gertrude is quite the opposite: a nurturing, caring figure who buoys the spirits of everyone around her.
Soon enough, Gertrude and Bernard are expecting their first child. Throughout the first half of the novel, Comyns balances these small joys with Bella’s distinctive narrative voice: sometimes self-effacing (her scar seems far worse in her own description than when others allude to it), sometimes understating some quiet horrors until the sheer scale of them trickles out. It’s an impressive way of balancing the bleaker aspects of this narrative with its moments of happiness. But lurking over everything is the fairy tale song in the epigraph and all that it portends. Besides its mention of a murderous mother and a cannibalistic father, it also alludes to a sister named Marlinchen.
All of this, then, lends a cast of inevitability to what comes next. Circumstances place Bella and Bernard together, as she does her best to raise Bernard and Gertrude’s son, Johnny, alongside Marline. On the one hand, this is a novel told in a realistic tone, about a hardworking, unflappable character making her way in the world. Under the rules of such a novel, a happy ending seems likely. On the other hand, there’s the fairy tale at the beginning, which suggests that a much bleaker outcome is on the horizon. Bella has become a stepmother; stepmothers rarely fare well in fairy tale narratives, both in terms of their actions and in terms of their fates. And as Johnny grows older, into someone who was “by nature an obedient boy, particularly when his father was not around,” he becomes a figure over whom danger hovers, solely due to his role in a narrative much older than him.
Throughout the novel, Comyns balances expectations, shifting seamlessly from one mode to the other, allowing two different sorts of tragedy to intermingle. Given that this novel subverts the trope of the wicked stepmother, it’s not ludicrous to think that it and Helen Oyeyemi’s similarly minded Boy, Snow, Bird would make for a fine literary double bill. In a recent essay by Leslie Jamison, about her own process of becoming a stepmother, Jamison described the process of reading fairy tales to her stepdaughter.
When I read her the old fairy tales about daughters without mothers, I worried that I was pushing on the bruises of her loss. When I read her the old fairy tales about stepmothers, I worried I was reading her an evil version of myself.
Everyone wants to believe they are the hero of their own story. Many people look to archetypal narratives to find one that mirrors of echoes their own life. But what happens when those archetypes suggest that you’re destined to be the villain of the story? While there are no overtly supernatural elements in The Juniper Tree, that sense of fate — of the accumulated power of hundreds of old stories taking on a malevolent form of agency — ultimately becomes the novel’s antagonist. Bella is capable of great love; her ability to protect her daughter is admirable and frequently heroic. But in the course of the novel, she’s one person; the weight of so many stories is like a force of nature.
If all of that makes The Juniper Tree sound as though it’s about a subtly waged war between ages-old stories and the shorter-lived humans who hear and retell them, that impression isn’t too far off the mark. And while this isn’t in full-blown Neil Gaiman or Jorge Luis Borges territory, it shares with the works of those writers the sense of how stories can infiltrate and influence the tactile world. One can read The Juniper Tree as a realistic tale of one woman’s shifting fortunes, or one can regard it as something more complex and almost metafictional. But what endures, besides the chilling weight of the tragic events that punctuate the narrative, is the way in which another narrative envelops this one, a ghost of a story that haunts the proceedings. Barbara Comyns could vividly depict the grit of life’s hardships just as easily as she could take readers past the border of the strange. In The Juniper Tree, she memorably did both.
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This Land Is Our Land
Over the past two decades, most of the land used for Jewish settlements in the West Bank has been acquired on the grounds that it belongs to the state. This tactic has enabled Israeli leaders to maintain that the state of Israel does not confiscate land from Palestinians to build settlements.
Sig Nordal 