You’d think that the novella would be a more popular form among American readers. Our level of distraction means that attention spans are too obliterated for serious novels in the 400-page range, and everybody knows that we refuse, have always refused, to buy short-story collections. So you’d think that the novella would be a pleasing medium, a nice compromise to make with ourselves. Nothing, of course, is compromised in the form itself. Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, Death in Venice, The Member of the Wedding, Notes from Underground, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — the list of vigorous shorties is a tall one.

At only 150 pages, German writer Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life is a whole book, a bantam beauty of extraordinary subtleness, a touching homage to personal composure, to the cultivation of one’s own silent spaces amid the brutal noise of being. Andreas Egger lives his solitary life on a mountain somewhere in Germany in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Orphaned young, he is brought up by a sadistic uncle, a farmer who beats him savagely enough to break his leg, saddling Egger with an unfixable limp. Egger grows, works, gets strong, buys his own mountainside plot, weds a village maiden who soon dies in a landslide, goes to war, suffers for eight years in a Soviet POW camp, returns to his mountain, works more, walks and thinks, misses his dead wife, feels alternately disgusted and grateful, and dies as simply as he’s lived.

That’s the entire story, the whole life of the title, expertly folded into the yardage most writers take just to clear their throats. The story unspools as a series of set pieces threaded together by contemplation: a horse-drawn hearse buckles in a ditch, the dead woman’s hand dangling from the casket; Egger writes his marriage proposal in fire on the mountainside; a falling tree severs a worker’s arm, “its fingers still gripping the hatchet”; Egger and a schoolteacher, in their seventies, fail at lovemaking and feel quietly humiliated — “People are often alone in this world,” she tells him, and they remain alone afterward. Egger’s eight years in a Russian camp, “this ice-bound, wounded world” north of the Black Sea, are dispatched in ten deft pages.

One needn’t have a view of the whole world in order to form a whole worldview. Excepting his time at war, Egger never encounters life beyond his mountainside and the valley beneath it. And yet Seethaler’s episodic, meditative armature makes a coherent vision of one man’s Weltanschauung. If most of the novelistic furniture has gone missing from this house — the dutifully detailed back story of emotional wreckage, the conveniently complex interiority, the handy psychological motives, etc. — its absence does nothing to impede the melancholy slap of this book, its dignified sadness in the face of such trampling loss. You can all too readily imagine an editor or agent trying to goad Seethaler into fleshing out, filling in, building up, and you can imagine it getting pummeled by the platitudes of your average MFA workshop: “I don’t feel a connection to anyone in this story” and “I need to know more about these characters to like them.” A Whole Life can’t be had by such musty formulae; it has the earned intransigence of art that proclaims itself unable to be anything other than what it demonstrably is.

Andreas Egger is not another version of the noble savage, nor is he a vista through which we apprehend divine manifestation in nature, a manifestation vital to certain strands of the Romantic worldview. “What is it we probers of Nature are seeking?” Goethe asks. “Out there the God whom within we hear speaking!” Seethaler’s conception of nature is closer to Hardy’s than Goethe’s, a nature indifferent at best and malignant at worst. Snow “seemed softly to swallow the landscape” and “the silence was absolute . . . the silence of the mountains that he knew so well, but which still had the capacity to fill his heart with fear.” The climate is an “eternal cold,” one “that gnaws the bones. And the soul.” Nature, says Emerson, forces upon you “the tyranny of the present” — something savage or something serene, it is a present that will not be shunned. Here, “the mountains breathe,” and not only that: they quake and consume. The landslide of snow and rock that kills Marie, Egger’s new wife, and decimates his home, sounds “as if something deep inside the mountain were splitting with a sigh” before the “deep, swelling rumble” rushes in and wrecks him.

The population of the village triples after the war, and Egger works as a tourist guide, but quickly he finds these intruders “increasingly hard to tolerate.” For the tourists who have thronged to the valley after the construction of the cable car, nature is the rumored balm they’ve come searching for. Egger cannot share their postcard conception of the wild. “People were evidently looking for something in the mountains that they believed they had lost a long time ago. He never worked out what exactly this was” as he watches them “stumbling . . . after some obscure, insatiable longing,” though it’s not the longing they stumble after. The longing lives within; what they stumble after is the appeasement of that longing, the satisfaction of half-formed yearnings. If Egger achieves the peace of his selfhood, it’s because he’s dismissed yearning altogether. His only ambitions are the quietude in which he can remember Marie and, like Nick Adams after a different war, the grunt work that will keep him from remembering too much.

Self-exiled, Egger is also self-fulfilled and so cannot be numbered among what Rilke names die Fortgeworfenen, those castaways with no place in the accepted social order. Instead, Egger is a hulking, limping embodiment of Goethe’s notion of “renunciation”: not a fed-up surrender to one’s fate, a submission to circumstance, but a cool-headed acceptance of the good and bad in tandem, a disciplined understanding that the world peddles both disaster and advantage, an understanding that’s kin to Keatsian negative capability. Egger has no articulated moral program, no preoccupation with moral maturity, but he knows right from wrong and behaves with considerable goodness toward others. The first we see of him, he has an infirm goatherd strapped to his back, toting him down a rock-ribbed mountain path in winter, trying to get him medical help. No one called him to attempt this rescue. He called himself.

Seethaler’s is an insistently sensuous realm: the warm feel of newborn piglets, their scent of “earth, milk, and pig muck,” or Marie’s hair smelling of “soap, hay, and . . . a little of roast pork.” There’s the scent of “dry moss and resin,” of “horse piss” and “lumps of cheese” and “primroses and leopard’s bane.” The pure physicality of Seethaler’s storytelling necessarily derives from the pure physicality of place. “Something’s stirring in the bones,” Egger thinks of spring, and that something’s stirring in the prose, too, in its verdant reticence. This reticence of prose is born of Egger’s own skeptical stance on language: “Talking meant attracting attention, which was never a good thing.” The cable car building crews and tourists are everywhere: “the rattling of the engines, the noise that suddenly filled the valley. Nobody knew when it would go away . . . or whether it ever would.” The only silence Egger can count on, he knows, is the silence that awaits in his grave.

Death is both an omnipresent reality and a mystery. A dying goatherd tells Egger: “People say death brings forth new life, but people are stupider than the stupidest nanny goat. I say death brings forth nothing at all! Death is the Cold Lady.” Children die from diphtheria, workers from falls, women and men from age — one old woman “lost consciousness while baking bread, toppled forwards and suffocated with her face in the dough.” In the Soviet camp, “after a few weeks Egger stopped counting the dead” because “death belonged to life like mold to bread.” One cable car worker tells Egger, “It’s a messy business, dying,” and when Egger replies that more merciless cold will come after death, the worker says: “Rubbish. There won’t be anything, no cold and certainly no soul. Dead is dead and that’s that. There’s nothing after that — no God, either. Because if there were a God, his heavenly kingdom wouldn’t be so bloody far away!”

Unswervingly tactile, Seethaler’s tale also rubs against the mysteries of spirit, as it must. This is a land where, for most, punishment by God means more than metaphor, more than myth, a land where people dwell among the occult, believe in ghosts and “bloodsucking forest demons,” feel presences for which they cannot account, and navigate their lives by signs, though the signs are often inscrutable. After moths appear on a windowpane, Egger “thought their appearance must be a sign, but he didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.” After the landslide kills Marie, “he wanted to understand” but “he knew there was nothing to understand.”

Loyally translated by Charlotte Collins, A Whole Life is a lovely whisper of a book, proceeding with an understated, mythical gravitas, pulsing with its own coiled possibilities, its anticipant calm, the heavy hush of its unfolding. If you are a reader who weeps with books, you will weep with this one.

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Jane Jacobs was an author and activist whose fame and influence derived from one book. It’s apt, then, that the most stirring part of the first major biography of Jacobs, Robert Kanigel’s enthusiastic and admiring Eyes on the Street, concerns the creation of that book, 1961’s paradigm-smashing The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

When it was published, Jacobs, who was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had been living in New York City for nearly three decades. The ideas that became Death and Life began brewing in the mid-1950s when Jacobs, then a writer for Architectural Forum, was shown around Philadelphia by celebrated urban planner Edmund Bacon. Bacon, something of a showman, started what he conceived as a “before and after” tour in a densely packed, impoverished black neighborhood where Jacobs observed people crowding the sidewalks and hanging out on stoops. Next, as Kanigel tells it, the planner proudly escorted her to a street that had been “the beneficiary of Bacon’s vision—bulldozed, the unsavory mess of the old city swept away, a fine project replacing it, all pretty and new.” Jacobs acknowledged that the street looked very nice, but what struck her with most force was the absence of human life: “She saw one little boy—she’d remember him all her life—kicking a tire. Just him, alone on the deserted street.” Worse yet, when she asked her guide where all of the people were, he appeared uninterested in the question.

Around the same time, Jacobs went on tours of East Harlem with community leader William Kirk; their meandering walks convinced her that so-called slums had a strong and functional social fabric, that razing dilapidated blocks to build tall modernist projects resulted, in Kanigel’s words, in “social glue weakened—a community, as Jane would put it, replaced by a dormitory.” Indeed, when a community group wanted to meet with residents of an East Harlem project that had replaced a chunk of the old neighborhood, its members were told that there was nowhere to gather except the basement’s laundry room.

Jacobs wasn’t an urban planner or an architect; she didn’t even have a college degree. But as Kanigel—whose previous books include On an Irish Island and The Man Who Knew Infinity —establishes in the first third of the book, she grew up challenging received wisdom and believing she could do anything, qualities that served her well as an uncredentialed woman taking on male-dominated professions, as she did in Death and Life. (The author is explicit in his desire to convey the hurdles Jacobs faced as a woman and a mother, so one wishes he’d focused less on her appearance—”never beautiful” and “not even memorably unbeautiful,” he marvels—or at least consulted a thesaurus before describing her as “fat and dumpy.”) Jacobs wrote in her own unique style, neither academic nor literary, full of observations, insights, and provocation. Across several pages, she lovingly described the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of her own chaotic-seeming Greenwich Village block, which involved a web of community ties that urban planners were blind to. “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” she declared in one of the book’s famous passages, “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.”

The Death and Life of Great American Cities had immediate impact. While critics took issue with its blind spots (among them Jacobs’s lack of analysis of race and ethnicity and her tendency to romanticize city life without fully acknowledging the costs of poverty and crime), readers found it thrilling. Jacobs’s prescription for vital cities—mixed-use buildings, population density, short blocks—has triumphed so completely that it’s difficult to appreciate how disruptive her thinking was to the status quo. Kanigel provides useful context of the postwar period, when destroying cities and rebuilding from scratch seemed the obvious course of action (although here, as throughout the book, he has an irritating tendency to make his point with rhetorical questions): “Was any old horse-and-wagon better suited to us today, more desirable, than a new automobile? Then in what impossible, upside-down universe would you not want to tear down an aging slum of nineteenth-century tenements and put up a new apartment complex designed to make life easier, airier, and brighter?” As far as Jacobs was concerned, easy, airy, and bright were better left in the suburbs. Whether landscaped “superblocks” were created as part of low-income housing projects, middle-income residences like Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town, or cultural complexes like Lincoln Center, she argued that overlarge structures set back from the street deadened, rather than revitalized, urban life.

Jacobs, who authored seven books, saw herself primarily as a writer, but when her own beloved neighborhood was threatened, she reluctantly abandoned her typewriter to enter the fray. She helped kill a proposal to narrow the sidewalks on her block in order to widen the street for cars and a plan to allow traffic into Washington Square Park, her children’s local playground. She is credited with a major role in defeating New York master builder Robert Moses’s planned Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have destroyed parts of the Soho and Little Italy neighborhoods to make room for an eight-lane highway. Jacobs and Moses are so often paired in a David and Goliath narrative—there’s even an opera about them—that it’s surprising to learn they may have met only once.

Kanigel’s account of how Jacobs came to write Death and Life is so compelling that the biography suffers a loss of momentum afterward. Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto in 1968 to protect her draft-age sons from serving in the Vietnam War. She became a Canadian citizen and remained in Toronto, a city she came to love, until her death, in 2006, at 89. Her later books were respectfully received, but none had the impact of her masterwork. All told, she had an interesting, contented life: a happy childhood, a solid marriage, well-adjusted children, work she loved along with ample recognition for it. “All these lucky things,” she herself said. The biggest drama of her life involved the formation and expression of her visionary ideas. Eyes on the Street works because as cities evolve and face fresh crises – gentrification, soaring rents, and renewed segregation — those ideas continue to challenge as much as they fascinate.

 

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All through this week the National Book Foundation is announcing the Longlists for the 2016 National Book Awards in Poetry, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Young People’s Literature.  Today the long list for the National Book Award for Fiction was revealed.  Five finalists will be chosen from this list in October, with the winner to be announced in November.  See the Longlist for Young People’s Literature here, Poetry here and Nonfiction here.

The 2016 National Book Award for Fiction Longlist:

Chris Bachelder, The Throwback Specia (W.W. Norton & Company)

 

 

 

 

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan)

 

 

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group)

 

 

 

Paulette Jiles, News of the World (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers)

 

 

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking Books / Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen (Penguin Press/Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (W.W. Norton & Company)

 

 

 

 

Brad Watson, Miss Jane (W.W. Norton & Company)

 

 

 

 

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday/Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers)

 

 

 

 

Some detaila about the selections from the National Book Foundation’s announcement:

“The year’s Longlist is told from and about locations all around the world. Authors hail from and titles explore locations that range from Alaska, New Delhi, Bulgaria, and even a reimagined United States.”

“Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad follows Cora, a fugitive slave, as she escapes the south on a literal underground railroad in a speculative historical fiction that reckons with the true legacy of liberation and escape. In a very different journey, former Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a mother as she traverses the country with her daughter, fleeing her powerful husband. What Belongs to You, a debut novel by Garth Greenwell, finds its American narrator in Sofia, Bulgaria attempting to reconcile the shame and desire bound up in his own sexuality. National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson, in her first adult novel in 20 years, depicts a young woman from Tennessee who has resettled in Brooklyn with her grieving family.

“The perennial themes of love, marriage, and family are also deftly explored in three of the longlisted titles. In Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen, a soon-to-be married couple must navigate personal values, economic pressures, and politics as their wedding day approaches. Former Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist Adam Haslett explores how mental illness afflicts a family over multiple generations in Imagine Me Gone. Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special chronicles a group of men who has obsessively met to reenact a tragic football play for nearly seventeen years as they confront middle age, marriage, and fatherhood in this exploration of the American male psyche.

“Looking towards the historical, former National Book Award Finalist Brad Watson’s Miss Jane explores the life of a woman with a genital birth defect in rural Mississippi during the early 20^th century. Paulette Jiles’ News of the World depicts post-Civil War America from the perspective of a retired Army captain who must deliver a young orphan, kidnapped by a Native American tribe, to her relatives on the other side of Texas.

“The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan takes us to New Delhi, India, where a community is devastated by the losses brought on by an act of terrorism. The novel shows the reader both sides of a terrorist attack—how the loss of even just a few lives can change the fates of others and gives us a window into how someone might become capable of committing such atrocities.”

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All through this week the National Book Foundation is announcing the Longlists for the 2016 National Book Awards in Poetry, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Young People’s Literature.  Today the long list for the National Book Award for Nonfiction was revealed.  Five finalists will be chosen from this list in October, with the winner to be announced in November.  See the Longlist for Young People’s Literature here and Poetry here. Tomorrow, the Longlist for Fiction will be announced.

The 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction Longlist:

Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House / Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House)

 

 

Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin Press / Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press)

 

 

 

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books)

 

 

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press)

 

 

 

Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown / Penguin Random House)

 

 

 

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 

 

 

Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press)

 

 

 

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon / Penguin Random House

 

 

 

Some detaila about the selections from the National Book Foundation’s announcement:

“Two titles that appear on the Longlist explore specific instances of American injustice: Adam Cohen’s Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.

“Two titles call for Americans to rethink and re-examine ideas about war: Andrew J. Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History is a reassessment of US military policy in the Middle East over the past four decades, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a kaleidoscopic look at how the Vietnam War is remembered around the world. Nguyen also notably won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Sympathizer.

“Three titles explore the legacy of slavery and racism in America: Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas In America, and Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.

“In The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Struggle for Social Justice, Patricia Bell-Scott draws on letters, journals, and interviews to contextualize Eleanor Roosevelt’s decades-long friendship with an African-American intellectual revolutionary.

“Addressing some of the most pressing issues in America today—partisan politics and equality—are Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Hochschild travels to the Louisiana bayou—a stronghold of the conservative right—to explore how the world looks from that perspective, and O’Neil analyzes algorithms, tests, and mathematical models intended to increase fairness, only to find they further obscure our humanity and compassion.”

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An incomplete list of unusual narrative points of view in fiction includes dog; wolf-dog; horse; dead girl; lizard; seagull; Death; monster; African elephant; cat; bowl; rabbit; mouse; guinea coin. To which we can now add fetus. Along with Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, thanks for thus enlarging the canon go to Ian McEwan, much-decorated author of sixteen previous works of fiction (Amsterdam, Atonement). But equal gratitude here is owed to Shakespeare, from whom McEwan has borrowed the plot in making literal Hamlet’s lament, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

While the choice of an incipient person as narrator might seem to offer a severely limited perspective on human concerns, due to his having had none yet, this is no ordinary fetus. He uses words like “philatelist,” “non-chordate,” “penumbra.” He proves himself an astute critic of poetry with a taste for scansion. He knows both his Latin and his wine (owing to a fifteen-part podcast on the subject listened to by his sleepless mother, not to mention the vintages she and he, by extension, ingest in quantity). He also ponders how to derail the murder plot he has been made to overhear. All in all, a canny egg.

With Nutshell McEwan has accomplished a small miracle: a well-wound thriller inside something bigger, a variegated meditation on folly, on the insistent untenability of this world to which we have given birth even as it gives birth to us, on the ability of art to encapsulate its mysteries. This, in a small package of fewer than two hundred pages. And especially in a small package, for his manifest intention is to create one of those exquisite miniatures that through a narrow scope view expansive territory. An exemplary post-postmodernist, McEwan chooses a form that also characterizes a subject who goes on to remark on the qualities of the form. A bit complicated, true, but that is also the point — and much of the pleasure — of his marvelous construction. “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces,” McEwan’s protagonist muses, going on to name the multitude of works that focus on a detail to imply an entirety: the eighteenth-century novel of manners, the portrait, the Dutch still life, the scientific study of a single organism or search for an atomic particle. “Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.” This speck knows how to take on mind-bendingly large concepts. All of a sudden I am put in mind of a possession I wondered at endlessly as a child: a little bean, capped with a tiny ivory elephant, that contained twelve even tinier replicas. Impossible, yet there it was.

The deepest pleasures of Nutshell are likewise extra-narrative, pleasant as that is: a tasty recipe cooked up of an affair based on hilariously depicted, if queasy, sex. (At one point the put-upon fetus remarks that the “turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing.”) The perpetrator is moreover an idiot, “dull to the point of brilliance,” but who has nonetheless “entranced my mother and banished my father.”

The ego of any writer confident enough to link arms with the greatest poet of the English language is decidedly intact. At the very least, McEwan shows himself the true son of his literary forebear in a bent for wordplay. He deflates the hackneyed by simply making it issue from the mouth of a pre-babe: “I might live with my father, at least for a while,” the narrator prognosticates — “Until I get on my feet.” Late in the pregnancy, “my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged.” A joke one minute, a stunning analysis of large truths the next; I can’t imagine any shrewder account of how and why the demise of a marriage requires the whole-cloth remaking of personal history. Grander still are the pages that deftly collate all the ills afflicting the globe in the current moment: in a couple of disquisitions each no longer than this review, a child not yet born sums up the myriad causes and dismal prospects of a planet on the brink. There are concise op-eds on subjects from greed to self-deception, overconsumption to political malfeasance, art history to lust. The author who devises all this, and does it in prose so smoothly assured it goes down like a good Sancerre, “preferably from Chavignol,” has pulled off one of the neatest tricks in recent literature.

If the diminutive narrator in these pages sounds suspiciously like someone who holds exactly the sort of vaunted CV as the author Ian McEwan, the fact is far less troubling than it is rewarding. Within the confines of Nutshell McEwan aspires to nothing less than compassing Shakespeare. So he works from dialectical plans: on the one hand, the most elevated of themes and execution, and on the other hand (“how I hate that phrase,” rightly opines our young commentator) what amounts to cerebral slapstick.

When all that transpires in utero has had its run, the waters break, and Nutshell at last makes a familiar adage uniquely true: the end is only the beginning.

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All through this week the National Book Foundation is announcing the Longlists for the 2016 National Book Awards in Poetry, Nonfiction, Fiction, and Young People’s Literature.  Today the long list for the National Book Award for Poetry was revealed.  Five finalists will be chosen from this list in October, with the winner to be announced in November.  See the Longlist for Young People’s Literature here. Tomorrow, the Longlist for Nonfiction will be announced.

The 2016 National Book Award for Poetry Longlist:

 

Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press)

 

 

 

Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 (W.W. Norton & Company)

 

 

 

 

Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press)

 

 

 

Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 

 

 

Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney’s)

 

 

 

Donika Kelly, Bestiary (Graywolf Press)

 

 

 

 

Jean Mead, World of Made and Unmade (Alice James Books)

 

 

 

Solmaz Sharif, Look (Graywolf Press)

 

 

 

 

Monica Youn, Blackacre (Graywolf Press)

 

 

 

Kevin Young, Blue Laws (Alfred A. Knopf)

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Marisa Silver’s fourth novel, Little Nothing, is a marvelous book. I mean “marvelous” in the this-critic-approves sense, sure: Her command of character, style, and storytelling is expert and sustained. But I also mean it in the sense of being full of marvels: Its story is suffused with magic, lycanthropy, circuses, and cliffhanger incidents of good luck and bad. We’re already awash in stories like this, especially at the multiplex, where we’re dazzled to be distracted. Silver, however, grasps that the best stories dazzle us to guide us to a deeper sense of being. “Sometimes this life is hard to believe,” muses one character, and Silver’s most impressive accomplishment is that her hard-to-believe incidents feel as stark and clear as thunderbolts.

To put this more simply: It’s a fairy tale. Its hero, Pavla, is a girl born in a rural town in an imaginary Balkans-ish place — the midwife who delivers her speaks Slovak, though all we know for certain is that the homeland is “routinely tossed back and forth between sovereign empires as a consolation prize for greater losses.” She is born a dwarf, much to her parents’ despair, and their despair means her childhood is stockpiled with cruelties, not least the doctor who recommends she be half-buried in the ground and exposed to hot oil treatments that theoretically would, “in combination with the moist earth, cause her skin to become elastic.”

Between the burns she suffers from that foolishness and the useless and brutal rack she is placed upon by her doctor — real-world medical quackery, both mental and physical, is the dark magic in this tale — Pavla has little choice but to use her damage and difference to her advantage, joining a circus to support her family. There, she has transformed from a small but pretty girl to a tall young woman but with wolfish features. From Jeckyll and Hyde to Twilight, werewolves have been symbols of humanity’s high and low, cultivation and ferality. Silver offers a more provocative spin: As Wolf Girl, Pavla is all low, “the synthesis of two things men have a need to routinely destroy: animals and women.” And when the circus keeper attempts to assault her, Pavla fights back by becoming fully wolfish.

That scene, like much of the novel, is constructed out of viscera and damage. War, explosions, gunfire, imprisonment, and abuse are all part of Little Nothing‘s milieu — Pavla is in a hunter’s sights more than once. But Silver’s grim backgrounding — the stuff of contemporary serious novels — is braided with and softened by the once-upon-a-time tone Silver uses to depict it. Terrible things happen, but her avuncular style (“When most people hear of a dwarf, they imagine court jesters or circus clowns . . . “) suggests that these terrible things are in service of a fable of transformation that accommodates uplift alongside its tragic turns.

Such a tone can risk making Pavla’s plights seem absurd, or minor — rubbery G-rated characters are forever getting out of scrapes at the multiplex, with kindly narrators holding kids’ hands through them. But Silver fully inhabits the fairy tale’s mission to speak to “the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless, the love of life, and the fear of death,” as Bruno Bettelheim wrote in his landmark 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment. Anybody who knows the Grimm Brothers’ original tales, where Little Red Riding Hood is devoured and Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilate their feet to fit in that glass slipper, knows that “grown-up fairy tale” can be a redundancy. That’s the spirit of Little Nothing; the upside of Pavla’s journey is less about the childhood fantasy of triumphantly conquering enemies than the grown-up work of conquering her internal fears.

She’s not alone in her labors. Following Pavla is Danilo, the doctor’s assistant who once strapped her to that miserable table but then fell in love with her. Though he remains stubbornly human, he’s awash in symbolism, too — he is the hunter, the outcast, the man who is missing his twin brother, a good man wrongly accused of madness. As Silver pairs his story with Pavla’s, she suggests that her physical transformation and his mental and social difference are two sides of the same coin. What Pavla feels internally is what Danilo receives externally from the war, and from his awareness that there is more to the world than his simple upbringing: “It is possible to become new.”

Fairy tales essentialize the world, package them into straightforward conflicts that, as Bettelheim suggested, make our emotional seas navigable to us. But they can also crack open the everyday, infuse it with a host of mysteries of shape-shifting and magic and change and unfairness. In Pavla and Danilo, Silver invents a pair who encompass that narrowness and widening, merging the realist-novel assertion that we are functions of our circumstances and the magical-marvelous assertion that we become more when we look beyond those circumstances. “The obvious question is the wrong question,” Danilo thinks at one point. “And that to interpret the world by way of its most available and reasonable clues will only lead him further down the narrow path that has, thus far, defined his existence.” Little Nothing is steeped in strangeness, but it’s driven by a basic question that frees the best novels and their heroes when the time comes to explore their worlds: What if there’s something else out there?

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“Here is the repulsant snozzcumber!” cried the BFG, waving it about. “I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But because I is refusing to gobble up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead!”

— from Roald Dahl’s The BFG

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously claimed that the interests of reason combine in three questions, one of which is “What may I hope?” . . . His solution: We may hope for the ultimate good, the summum bonum — happiness in proportion to virtue.

— from Jacob M. Held’s “On Getting Our Just Desserts: Willy Wonka, Immanuel Kant and the Summum Bonum,” collected in Roald Dahl and Philosophy

Roald Dahl was born a hundred years ago this week — on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Wales (now part of Cardiff). Dahl’s Norwegian parents were not involved with it directly, but coal mining dominated South Wales, the hardships of the pit the only option for many of Dahl’s contemporaries. The dark vein that runs through many of his tales for children reflects, in part, his observation that life sometimes offers only snozzcumber to those who deserve chocolate.

But Dahl’s dark streak has other roots. Dahl dedicated The BFG to his daughter, Olivia, who died from measles in 1962, aged seven. Two years earlier, his infant son was severely injured when hit by a New York taxicab; three years later his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a series of cerebral aneurysms that put her in a coma, leading to years of rehabilitation. Dahl’s older sister died of appendicitis when he was just a three-year-old, and then weeks later his father died of pneumonia. In his biography Storyteller, Donald Sturrock reads Dahl’s first adult novel, Sometime Never (1948), as a reflection of the psychological scars that resulted from his WWII service in the RAF and perhaps triggered his career as a writer. The story is a nuclear holocaust fable; the protagonist is a pilot who loved to fly but whose only recourse now, says Sturrock, is flight of fancy:

His reasonable exterior disguises “a black despair, a deep and certain fatalism which made him impatient with the great importance which all men attached to their own individual lives.” . . . And this despair, this loss of rapture and fantasy, will remain uncured. “A solemn person, whose quick and distant eyes told of a mind behind the eyes which travelled often in remote outlandish places far away.”

The pilot is killed suddenly, by the bomb that launches World War Three. Dahl himself built a writing hut at the bottom of his garden and moved on to children’s stories, devising the remote, outlandish places that have charmed the world — his books translated into sixty languages, his grateful readers leaving toys and notes on his grave in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

Dahl may or may not be “the world’s number one storyteller” (his website), or the “greatest storyteller of all time” (his publisher), but he is ample proof for the thesis behind Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Gottschall’s book discusses new developments in the sciences and humanities that shed light on “the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.” He explores “the deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe and what they reveal about story’s prehistoric origins.” He analyzes how fiction “powerfully modifies culture and history,” how our brains impose narrative structure on our daily lives and provide us with “the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams.” And he offers this warning about the empty-calorie fictional foods that surround us today:

[I]t could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent — and where we have, in romance novels and television shows like Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd [On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction] is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.

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Ann Patchett is drawn to the often unexpected bonds people form in unusual circumstances. Many of her novels are predicated on what might be called the Magic Mountain syndrome, which she described succinctly in an essay in her 2013 collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage: “a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement.” In Bel Canto, high-profile guests attending a lavish birthday party for a powerful, opera-loving Japanese businessman in South America pair off in unanticipated combinations when they are held hostage. In State of Wonder, a team of research scientists in pursuit of a missing colleague and a miracle fertility drug in the Amazon rain forest find themselves relying on each other in new ways in the heart of darkness. And in Commonwealth, her most autobiographical novel to date, six stepsiblings from two broken marriages are thrown together during court-mandated summer vacations in Virginia, forming a surprisingly tight-knit “fierce little tribe.” The children, four girls and two boys, are united in part by their shared disillusionment with the two parents whose affair instigated the implosion of their original families. But after the oldest boy dies during one of their unsupervised escapades, they drift apart — yet remain forever linked by their uneasy sense of guilty complicity.

Commonwealth opens with another classic narrative catalyst: the uninvited guest. On a hot June Sunday in the 1960s, Beverly and Francis Xavier (Fix) Keating throw a christening party for the younger of their two daughters, Franny. Because many of the attendees are Fix’s fellow cops from the Los Angeles Police Department, “half the party was armed.” The afternoon takes a turn when an uninvited guest shows up bearing a bottle of gin. The interloper is Bert Cousins, a deputy DA, who is on the lam from weekend daddy duty with his three kids. From the moment he spots beautiful Beverly Keating he’s smitten. Unlike his pregnant wife, Teresa, Beverly has kept herself up and is dazzling in her yellow dress. Bert notes enviously that “Fix Keating had fewer children and a nicer watch and a foreign car and a much-better-looking wife” — all this despite the fact that “The guy hadn’t even made detective.” Before the party is over, he will have kissed the hostess and set in motion a chain of events that will reverberate over the next five decades.

There have been early glimpses of the personal story behind Commonwealth in Patchett’s work. The title essay in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage addresses the author’s long family history of failed marriages and the generational “flotsam” from divorce — which led to Patchett’s early decision not to have children. It also contributed to two prominent themes in much of her work, including Commonwealth: commitment, and the importance of compassion to get through life. Both were factors in Patchett’s late, happy second marriage, which took her by surprise.

There is no shortage of great literature about the fallout from divorce and the reconfigured families that children are left to cope with. (Martha McPhee’s Bright Angel Time, featuring a motley gang of stepsiblings under the sway of a charismatic guru-like stepfather, springs to mind as another example of what in today’s world of intensely focused parenting seems like carelessness if not outright neglect.) Commonwealth stands out on many levels, from its assured handling of complex time shifts to Patchett’s extraordinary compassion even for seriously flawed characters like Bert. Her deeper sympathies clearly lie with Bert and Beverly’s two betrayed spouses, saintly Teresa Cousins and warm Fix Keating, who eventually find happiness with kinder partners. They also benefit from the tag-teaming care of their grown children in their final years. “What do the only children do?” Franny Keating asks her sister after a difficult eighty-third birthday outing with their dying father. “We’ll never have to know,” Caroline answers. In fact, Commonwealth — like Patchett’s essay “The Wall” — can be read in part as a love song to her father, who, like Fix, was a detective with the LAPD.

Patchett’s gift for characterization and empathy extends to each of the six children, from smart, bossy Caroline, who pleases both her father and stepfather by becoming a lawyer, to wayward Albie, Bert’s youngest, who is most affected by his older brother’s death, for reasons I’ll leave for readers to discover. If there’s a hole in her narrative, it’s Beverly, who remains a void beneath the surface of her multi-husband-catching glamorous looks.

Franny Keating is the linchpin of the novel. While her christening party is ground zero for Beverly and Bert’s ultimately doomed relationship, it’s Franny’s childhood memories — confided to a famous washed-up writer she meets while working as a barmaid in Chicago after dropping out of law school — that change the thrust of Patchett’s book. This narrative line, while initially jarring, ultimately elevates Commonwealth above your usual broken-home saga. When Leon Posen channels Franny’s stories into a wildly successful novel (also called Commonwealth), she is torn between her happiness about her role in his comeback and her serious misgivings about the propriety of having divulged family secrets.

Although Posen’s behavior is somewhat monstrous — he’s a married drunk thirty-two years older than Franny who milks her devotion and lack of direction — Patchett resists demonizing him. Franny and Leon’s relationship was “built on admiration and mutual disbelief,” she writes, and Franny “was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark . . . And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.” Yes, “She had made a terrible error in judgment,” Patchett writes with typical judiciousness, but “he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful.”

Yet among all the troubling aspects of their relationship, the “nail in the tire” turns out to be Franny’s anguish over having betrayed her primary bond with her extended family. She realizes the gravity of her transgression when her estranged stepbrother turns up, horrified after coming across a copy of Posen’s novel and recognizing himself in its pages.

It’s worth stepping away from Patchett’s absorbing narrative to realize that she is after something extraordinary here: In a novel based loosely on her own disjointed childhood — the closest to home she’s ever come in her fiction — she is raising questions about the propriety of going public about such shared, private experiences. Who owns the story? Who has the right to turn it into a book that will sell thousands of copies and be read by strangers?

Although in Patchett’s scenario Franny doesn’t actually write Commonwealth, she feels guilty for having shared what wasn’t hers alone, enabling Leon Posen to capitalize on it. Patchett, however, has written a version (presumably heavily fictionalized) of her family’s story in this novel. And as she did in Truth & Beauty, a searing memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, she has incorporated into her art her compunctions about telling a story that isn’t entirely hers to tell. In an age where so little is sacrosanct, this is remarkable.

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“This is no how-to manual.” Right. Playing Dead is no more not a how-to guide than is The Anarchist Cookbook. Nevertheless, here you will learn (or learn about) the dark art of fabricating your own disappearance. Or, should you wish to go six feet deeper, how to commit pseudocide — fake suicide. For those who prefer the step-by-step approach, there is one of those if/then diagrams, with boxes of questions and arrows that chart your next step depending upon your answer, a map through the mazy minefield of death fraud. Elizabeth Greenwood endeavors to kill herself. That’s commitment, even is she’s only playing.

What do Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakki , Juliet Capulet, Tom Sawyer, and Dan Draper share in common? They all faked their death. Playing dead is a hoary old trick, running across species — possums, of course, but it’s also practiced by lemon sharks, snakes, goats, and a passel of others — and serving as a protonarrative for many a myth. It was an exit strategy that Greenwood considered when her student loans threatened to reduce her life to debt management, half steps toward a vanishing point. No, “the dross of life would not inflict itself upon me: I would arrange and edit to suit my specifications. Faking death would be a refusal, a way to reject the dreary facts.”

But Greenwood didn’t rack up a “$100,000 deficit . . . (Well, actually closer to a half million after the lifetime of accrued credit)” via schooling without learning she had to do her homework, and so the “journey through the world of death fraud” begins. Playing Dead may be Greenwood’s first book, yet it is smart as a fox, displaying a wicked sense of humor braided with rue. It can’t help but be existential — of the plight-of-the-individual, assumption-of-unknowable-responsibility school — considering the subject matter. Still, Greenwood lifts the act of falling off the face of the earth from its melancholic slough to higher ground by telling us stories of how to pull it off without pulling the plug and how not to, true stories told by those who have done it and those paid to discover if someone is cheating the reaper (that would be the insurance company).

There are an average of 90,000 missing people in/from the United States at any one time. A very small percentage of them will have gone willfully absent for some reason, though a very significant percentage will be on the run from money trouble. “Money isn’t everything,” said one of Greenwood’s more roguish death fakers from money-poor northern England, “but it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent of everything.” One moment before you climb on a high horse. “Greed is easy to see in others when you have enough. But when your origins are more humble, the goalpost of ‘enough’ moves constantly,” writes Greenwood. Wise beyond her years, she makes good use of that $100,000 education and remembers growing up in hardscrabble Worcester, Massachusetts as bleak as any Brontëan childhood.

Then again, there is greed. Your Ponzi scheme has fallen apart. As you enter the courtroom, an FBI agent leans in and whispers, “I have two words for you: Costa Rica.” What to do? You look under “privacy consultant” in the Yellow Pages. Greenwood finds one such — a blustery gent with high self-regard but a privacy consultant’s privacy consultant — who takes her through the paces. To start with, disappearing and pseudocide are different animals. Unless you have good (or no-good) reason to fake your death, disappearing is the way to go — from an incessant stalker, for instance. Dissolving your identity, physically and digitally, is not a crime. It isn’t simple, either, thus the consultant who destroys as much information on you as possible while sowing false leads. Then you must live off the grid, an austere ecosystem for sure: you must work off the books, pay all your bills through an LLC, leave behind almost everything, though there are devious ways of making contact with loved ones. File for any piece of paper — like a library card — under a false identity, and you have committed fraud. Now you are a criminal, a like-it-or-not fugitive.

Faking death, on the other hand, is a science. Brain surgery science, requiring an expert to kill you and appreciating that an expert will be tracking you if you are illegally skipping town or cashing in an insurance policy. For this chapter, Greenwood taps the experience of a private investigator who specializes in surprising the undead. The biggest problem with faking death is the need for others to help you. That might mean procuring a surrogate body; it will certainly require false documents, including a certificate of death. These co-conspirators will be of unsavory ilk. They are not your friends; you are another cash cow. Greenwood sits agog as the investigator fires questions at her: Can you leave your life behind, never see your family and friends again? Are you in good health, with enough cash to live for two or three years, with someone you trust to file the insurance claim, and an alternative identity prepared (one that you have taken a couple of years to construct)? What about your Internet presence, how about fingerprints on file? Have you an intelligent way to die? Hiking is a good one, but a natural disaster is better. How’s your conscience, your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment?

Greenwood’s storytelling invites you to participate. It challenges you to participate, and it  takes sauce simply to enter these precincts. It is inadvisable, however, to follow Greenwood as she takes the investigative reporter’s dangerous plunge. (This is not to say that Greenwood is as flawless as a Fabergé egg. She pops some corn — “Perhaps faking death and disappearing appeals to the part of us that still carves authenticity and unfettered solitude, the truest antidote to loneliness” — and serves forth her share of floppers: “the thought undulating through my skull like squid ink.”) She travels to the Philippines to fake her death. No spoilers, but let’s say when she returns to the United States and shows some documents to her private investigator friend, he notes that “this one sucks. They actually double printed it with an inkjet printer.” How’s your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment? “Every debt has to be repaid. Repaying one’s debts, according to Plato, at least, is the true definition of justice,” Greenwood decides. See what an education will get you?

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