Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday October 7, 2010
|
HUMAN CHAIN: POEMS
Seamus Heaney
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978 0 374 17351 7
85 pages
$24
Reviewed by Troy Jollimore, whose new book of poems, "At Lake Scugog," will be published next year
Seamus Heaney is among the most famous and esteemed living poets. His 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature confirmed the image most already had of him, as a towering figure, a grandmaster, an eminence. And at the age of 71 he is, one has to admit, getting up there. Nor has he managed to avoid all the ill-effects of aging. A few years ago he suffered a stroke, which forced him to take nearly a year off from writing and other activities. Yet despite all this, Heaney still writes with the passion, freshness and vigor of a young man. "Human Chain," which sits comfortably alongside such accomplished earlier collections as "Field Work" and "Station Island," feels at times less like a late work than a first book by a remarkably gifted and promising young poet.
That said, "Human Chain" is also -- and I mean this in the best possible sense -- an old man's book. The poems are pervaded by an awareness of mortality, of encroaching darkness. At times this awareness proves nearly too sad to bear:
Derek Hill's saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could no longer bear to watch
The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.
Many of these poems feel like elegies, longing wistfully for a vanished world or expressing the desire that that world might somehow be restored. Other poems are resigned to loss. In "The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark," Heaney visits the house of his deceased friend David Hammond, to find that he feels
for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield in high summer.
Through much of the book, though, the pain of grief and anticipated grief is made bearable through various means: most important, perhaps, being the recognition that an individual life -- and thus an individual death -- is only one small element of a much larger world. This larger world is sometimes conceived as a kind of afterlife or heaven. "So this is what an afterlife can come to?" he asks in one poem. In another he imagines a bus ride as a journey to the underworld and describes how the passengers "reboarded / And were reincarnated seat by seat."
But the larger life need not be conceived in mythical terms: Family also provides a kind of continuity within which the particular life can find consoling meaning. "Route 110," which borrows imagery from Virgil's "Aeneid," ends with a moving birth scene:
So now, as a thank-offering for one
Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,
I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads
Like tapers that won't dim
As her earthlight breaks and we gather round
Talking baby talk.
This tableau -- the aged spiritual voyager who will soon return to that "shaded bank" confronted with the radical newness of a soul that has just been brought from there -- suggests a kind of "human chain," the chain of genetic relations that unites us with our long-ago ancestors and our yet to be imagined successors.
The title poem, meanwhile -- which also ends with what might be an image of death -- turns out to describe a chain of people passing bags of meal from "hand to hand." Those bags of meal bear some resemblance to human bodies, and indeed throughout this collection it is often people who are being carried: "Helping him to the bathroom, my right arm / Taking the webby weight of his underarm" (from "Album"). "Not the one who takes up his bed and walks / But the ones who have known him all along / And carry him in -- " (from "Miracle"). In "Chanson d'Aventure," it is Heaney himself, post-stroke, who is carried and loaded into the waiting ambulance with his wife beside him, spending the ride to the hospital "ecstatic and bisected / By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula."
Heaney's brush with death might help explain not only why mortality is so much on his mind, but also why he seems insistent on viewing death, and other possible catastrophes, as opportunities for transformation. The opening poem, "Had I Not Been Awake," gives an account of a freak weather occurrence -- "A wind that rose and whirled" -- that ends up re-described as "A courier blast that there and then / Lapsed ordinary. But not ever / After. And not now." That transformative wind returns in the final poem, "A Kite for Aibhin," which concludes: "Until string breaks and -- separate, elate -- // The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall." That wish -- that death might represent a liberation, a passage to a higher state of being -- is ubiquitous in this collection, and it infuses these meditative poems with a spiritual buoyancy, a subtle and reassuring joy.
And indeed, the book is a joy on every level. The voice is strong and assured, the images are vivid and memorable. Most important, the music, as always with Heaney, is lovely. There is so much life in "Human Chain" that one wishes he were, in fact, just starting out. It is wonderful, and heartbreaking, to think of the books this promising poet might go on to write, given another 50 years or so.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THE LUCKY ONES: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
Mae Ngai
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 618 65116 0
288 pages
$26
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post
Anyone observing the controversy over illegal Latin American immigration should remember that today's high emotions are pale evocations of how the United States treated Chinese immigrants from 1882 to 1943.
The Exclusion Laws were just what the name implied: Chinese merchants were allowed entrance, but laborers and unattached women were unequivocally barred from this country. In the last quarter of the 19th century, irate American citizens -- especially on the West Coast, from where I write -- looked around and saw entirely too many Chinese people. A strong physical, spiritual and emotional aversion possessed our country, and working-class Chinese became anathema in America. The exclusion laws weren't lifted until 1943, the middle of World War II, when the Chinese, beaten up by Japan for a decade or so, became our de facto friends.
This book is not about the exclusion laws per se, though it could not exist without them. Mae Ngai has chosen to write about the class of Chinese who, in the early days of immigration, owed their existence to "profiting from the legal regime of racial discrimination. ... (They) became labor contractors, transportation agents, and government interpreters." These people, under white supervision, monitored the traffic from Asia to America. They were meant to help stem the tide of Chinese people who were lying like mad to reach the comparative safety of this country.
The Chinese interpreters were one step ahead of the unfortunates they tried to control. They had access to immigration papers, boardinghouses, transportation -- something as simple yet potentially lucrative as getting an immigrant from a ship to a place to stay; their hands were on all the ropes. The author calls these people "the lucky ones," and her new book traces the story of three generations of a Chinese interpreter's family -- hard workers who attained a place in the upper middle class very early during this wave of immigration.
They did it by working for the white man, and everything that implies. Their loyalties were toward their employers. Some of them conformed to the values and rules of their Caucasian bosses, and some of them were shameless crooks, extorting money from Chinese who were desperately trying to get into the country. They also took commissions on steamer tickets, made money by posting bond for people believed to be flight risks, and charged job seekers finder's fees.
These interpreters were disconcertingly similar to today's "coyotes," who drive their illegal cargo across the Sonoran Desert and then pile them up in anonymous tract houses on this side of the border. The interpreters rose inevitably in the United States, but they weren't exactly beloved by either race.
With remarkable -- some might say chilling -- objectivity, Mae Ngai follows the fortunes of her chosen family, the Tapes of San Francisco. Joseph Tape, whose Chinese name was Jeu Dip, came to this country in 1864. He was only 12. He went to work as a drayman at first, with one horse and one cart, and worked like a fiend for his whole life, mainly doing interpreting work for immigration officials. He amassed real estate, hunting lodges and luxury cars. His female relatives dressed beautifully. He married a girl by the name of Mary, who didn't even have a recorded Chinese name. The couple avoided Chinatown like the plague. (In fact, in 1900, 22 people in San Francisco died of the plague, most of them Chinese. Whites wanted to raze Chinatown, but never got around to it.)
The Tapes had children, three girls and a boy. Joe's son made extra money from extortion and had a checkered, somewhat shameful career. Two of the girls married interpreters. Their whole thrust was to become "American," but this came at a considerable cost. Three of the four Tape children divorced or separated; the women tended to suffer from depression.
The author leaves out a lot. She leaves out the loathsome rhetoric of hysterical, hate-filled whites against the Chinese. She writes cheerily about Chinese in locked railroad cars at the St. Louis World's Fair, but leaves out the fear and sadness that must have come from being locked up. She talks about the Angel Island immigration station (which wasn't built until 1910) but leaves out its horrors. She relies most heavily on census documents and other historical records, which are, of course, refreshingly exempt from emotion. Only some photographs and a couple of still-living descendants give any personal information.
The Tapes exist here as the product of documents, and of course this is an interesting and informative book, but except for a few lines about depression, there's no suffering here at all. The early Tapes seem hardly to have been human. Which, of course, is what the whites thought all along.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
MAN IN THE WOODS Scott Spencer
Ecco
ISBN 978 0 06 146655 7
305 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
We don't often encounter novels that combine shrewd plotting, strong characters and gorgeous writing, but Scott Spencer's "Man in the Woods" does precisely that. It's about many things, including love, God and the random accidents that can change our lives. Spencer's most famous novel, "Endless Love" (1979), dealt with obsessive teenage passion; this one is about grown-ups confronting both the joys and dangers that love can bring.
The lovers are Kate Ellis and Paul Phillips. When Kate appeared in Spencer's 2004 novel, "A Ship Made of Paper," she was drinking too much and losing her lover to another woman. But much has changed in the new book, set in the closing months of 1999. Kate has embraced both Alcoholics Anonymous and Christianity, and written an inspirational, best-selling book about her new life. Moreover, she's fallen wildly in love with Paul, and they're living together, along with her 8-year-old daughter, in her house in the Hudson River Valley. Good-hearted Kate, in her early 40s, is bright, articulate and lusty; taciturn Paul, a master carpenter, is 10 years older, handsome, independent and more spiritual than religious. They're one of the healthiest, happiest couples you'll find in today's fiction.
But, this being a Scott Spencer novel, their happiness is soon imperiled. Early in the book, returning home after a frustrating day in Manhattan, Paul stops in a state park to unwind and happens on a man who is beating his dog. Paul asks him to stop, the man takes offense, a fight ensues, and, to Paul's horror, the man dies, whereupon Paul flees. When he tells Kate what happened, she fully supports him. Nothing appears in the papers, and they hope the whole thing will go away. However, we readers know what Paul and Kate do not, that a dogged ex-policeman is pursuing the case. Thus, an agonizing question hovers over the rest of the story: Will these two decent people have their happiness destroyed (perhaps by manslaughter charges) because of a senseless encounter with an unbalanced man?
It's a good plot, but we often forget about it as we're swept along by the beauty of Spencer's writing. Here, for example, is a glimpse of Kate's daughter: "She shields her eyes with her little starfish of a hand." Kate jokes about AA gatherings where "there is an unspoken competition in these meetings, a race to the bottom, in which having suffered the greatest humiliations, the most bewildering blackouts, the most irrevocable losses of love, occupation, position, and self-respect makes you the winner." But she's not joking when she tells a friend who's fallen off the wagon: "It's like a demon, Sonny, and it's furious with you for turning your back on it. It will do anything and say anything to get you to put it inside of you."
Born-again Kate agonizes a lot about religion: "Kate has sometimes despaired that the average intelligence in the nation of unbelievers is drastically higher than the intelligence in the devout community. ... Yet if Christ and his message are real, then the dumbbells win and the chrome domes lose." Sometimes Paul seems to have become her religion: "Holy is the silence he affords her when he sees she is thinking, holy are the windows he has placed in her house, in her life, and her soul, holy is the smell of wood, holy is the carpenter, holy is his gaze when she is speaking, holy is the catch in his breath when she kisses him. ..." Her eloquent tribute ends, finally, "Holy is his stumbling circular path to God."
And here is Paul on Kate: "He is not unfamiliar with successful people, but he has never had a relationship with a woman of large and worldly achievement, and the pleasure it brings him to bask in the reflected glow of her success has been a surprise to Paul, with an unexpected erotic component. There is something grand about going home with a woman everybody loves." And: "He loves her expression during sex, open and undefended, with a creaturely purity and singularity of purpose."
This is a book to savor and read aloud, a book that is variously wise, funny and heartbreaking. But how does it end? What about the man in the woods? Poor Kate worries incessantly that "they will never outrun it, it will catch up to him, to them, it will destroy everything. " The outcome must not be revealed here, except to say that it is as powerful as everything else in the book. "Man in the Woods" is one of the three best novels I've read this year -- the others are Laura Lippman's "I'd Know You Anywhere" and Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" -- and if you pressed me, I'd put it at the top of the list.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
STORYTELLER: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
Donald Sturrock
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978 1 4165 5082 2
655 pages
$30
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
When 74-year-old Roald Dahl died from leukemia in 1990, I wrote a longish essay about the enormously popular, and often controversial, author of "James and the Giant Peach" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Waspishly opinionated, frequently offensive, a hard bargainer with publishers and a prima donna with editors, reclusive, family-focused and outrageously funny, Dahl struck me then as the Evelyn Waugh of children's literature. One could almost imagine the savage author of "Black Mischief" and "A Handful of Dust" writing "The Twits" or "Matilda."
Having read and admired Jeremy Treglown's "Roald Dahl" (1994), I didn't think there would be much new in this authorized biography. I was wrong. Donald Sturrock's "Storyteller" enriches the now-familiar outline of an eventful life with much new information, peels away the layers of myth that Dahl promulgated about himself, and makes clear the man's immense charm as well as his cold self-possession and emotional callousness. This is a major literary biography, immensely satisfying to read and worthy of its complex subject.
Dahl was only 3 when his Norwegian-born father died, leaving a sizable fortune (from shipping and coal). As a boy he attended prestigious Repton School, whose headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, aka "The Boss," eventually became archbishop of Canterbury. But instead of continuing on to university, young Dahl joined the Asiatic Petroleum Co., ultimately being posted to what was then Tanganyika, where he lived something of a pukka sahib life.
With the outbreak of World War II, Dahl trained as a pilot but crashed his plane, disastrously, en route to his first post in North Africa. His nose was pushed into his face and his body mangled: He suffered from spinal problems and headaches for the rest of his life and periodically underwent palliative operations to relieve the pain. While Dahl ultimately recovered well enough to fly again -- he participated in active aerial combat over Greece -- he was ultimately deployed to Washington to work in promoting the British war interests here. He was, after all, a tall, attractive English ace with five confirmed kills -- and, he now implied, he'd been shot down in the desert.
During his time in Washington, Dahl displayed astonishing social skills, becoming a confidant of Vice President Henry Wallace, winning the lasting friendship of newspaper magnate Charles Marsh, and bedding a series of pretty girls and older society matrons. Sturrock names names, including those of Clare Booth Luce, oil heiress Millicent Rogers and cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden. Dahl also became a spy for British intelligence's William "Intrepid" Stephenson, the landlord of philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, because of the influence of C.S. Forester, a writer. The creator of Capt. Horatio Hornblower had been asked to use Dahl's wartime crash as the basis for a propaganda article, but over dinner with the novelist, Dahl suggested that he himself scribble an initial draft. It was so accomplished that Forester's agent sold it to the Saturday Evening Post, where it appeared in 1942 as "Shot Down Over Libya."
With this encouragement, Dahl began to write in earnest. His first major project was a series of stories about gremlins, leprechaun-like creatures who vex pilots with all sorts of mischief. For a long time, Walt Disney hoped to make a movie based on a script Dahl wrote about gremlins, and this led to the writer spending time in Hollywood, where he hung out at Hoagy Carmichael's pool and slept with a former girlfriend of Cary Grant and Howard Hughes. But the Disney movie deal fell through, the war ended and Dahl moved back to England.
After a couple of misjudged projects -- the novel "Some Time Never" is an example of apocalyptic science fiction -- Dahl began to publish a series of macabre and often nasty short stories. These "tales of the unexpected," as he later called them, often involved insidious wagers: In "Taste," for instance, an acquisitive father "stakes his eighteen-year-old daughter's hand in marriage in a bet against a lecherous middle-aged wine connoisseur" who must precisely identify an obscure Bordeaux's vintage and vineyard. Oddly enough, Sturrock fails to mention Dahl's most famous short story, "Lamb to the Slaughter," in which a wife who has killed her husband ingeniously disposes of the highly original murder weapon.
The publisher Alfred Knopf liked these macabre tales and so brought out Dahl's first important book, "Someone Like You," and later followed up with its companion volume, "Kiss Kiss."
Then, on a business trip back to New York, Dahl met the actress Patricia Neal, who was brokenhearted over the end of her affair with Gary Cooper. In short order he persuaded her to marry him and live in what was sometimes known as the "Valley of the Dahls." Their life together was rocky from the start. But the pair made a go of it for a long while, and several terrible disasters -- including the death of a child -- drew them close. When Neal suffered a debilitating stroke at just 39, Dahl oversaw a relentless program for her recovery.
While Roald Dahl was deeply devoted to his mother, sisters and children, relishing the role of family man, he regularly cheated on Neal. The affairs were casual up until his mid-50s, when the writer fell in love with the 20-years-younger Felicity Crosland who, after much angst all around, became his second wife. The marriage proved a serenely happy one and allowed for the great final flourishing of the 1980s children's books: "The BFG," "The Witches," "Matilda" and the highly embroidered memoirs "Boy" and "Going Solo." I reviewed all these, and there's no denying his gripping power as a storyteller. J.K. Rowling, for one, clearly learned a lot from Dahl.
Such is an overview of Roald Dahl's life, but only that. Sturrock's "Storyteller" is so packed with intimate details, sharply intelligent commentary and surprising revelations -- in an early draft of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" the boy hero was black -- that it should be read immediately by anyone interested in Dahl, the ins and outs of modern publishing or the art of biography. I can't sing its praises enough.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 EXLEY
BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF
THE POLLUTERS: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
MY LIE: A True Story of False Memory |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
