Dwight Garner

Bernardine Evaristo’s eighth work of fiction, “Girl, Woman, Other,” shared the Booker Prize this year with Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments,” a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” These novels are linked for posterity now, like conjoined siblings.

Was this split decision a dereliction of duty on the jury’s part or is more the merrier? Two Nobel Prizes in literature were distributed this year as well, for a different reason. (The gold medal, diploma and check were withheld last year because of sexual harassment and corruption in the academy.)

Perhaps this is a health-giving direction. Iris Murdoch, in 1967, wanted the Beatles to be jointly named Poet Laureate in England. After scanning the cable news most nights, I’d hardly be averse to voting for the cast of “Oklahoma!” for president in 2020.

“Girl, Woman, Other” is a big, busy novel with a large root system. The characters start to arrive (Amma, Yazz, Dominique, Carole, Bummi and LaTisha) and they keep arriving (Shirley, Winsome, Penelope, Megan/Morgan, Hattie and Grace). Everyone should be provided with a latte and a nametag.

We meet these characters’ friends and sometimes their families, too. Lorrie Moore has written that Ann Beattie’s fiction is a valentine to friendships. The same is true of Evaristo’s. This novel is a densely populated village where everyone leans on one another in order to scrape by.

The primary character is probably Amma, a black lesbian playwright, now in her 50s, whose new play is being produced at the National Theater in London. Success has taken her out of range of some of her old anxieties about life and put her in range of awkward new ones.

After a life spent on the margins, criticizing the center of the culture, is Amma selling out? If privilege is the original sin of wokeness, what happens when you accumulate privilege yourself?

This slice of the story is semi-autobiographical. Amma founds a theater company with a friend. Evaristo was co-founder, with two other women, of the Theater of Black Women in the early 1980s.

Amma’s story is followed by 11 others that drift back and forth in time. One character, Carole, attends Oxford (she complains about the “revolting Stone Age food”) and becomes an investment banker. Another, Hattie, is 93 and lives on a farm in Northern England. Still others are young and live in contemporary London.

This polyphonic novel, packed with interconnected stories, is similar in some ways to the monologues in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” It may also remind some readers of Alison Bechdel’s warm and sophisticated comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.”

Like that comic, “Girl, Woman, Other” presents a landscape of abiding multicultural sensitivity. Evaristo’s dedication sets the tone: “For the sisters &amp; the sistas &amp; the sistahs &amp; the sistren &amp; the women &amp; the womxn &amp; the wimmin &amp; the womyn &amp; our brethren &amp; our bredrin &amp; our brothers &amp; our bruvs &amp; our men &amp; our mandem &amp; the LGBTQI+ members of the human family.”

This dedication will prompt many readers of my acquaintance to rush inside and just as many others to flee in the opposite direction. A few, like squirrels on two-lane blacktop, will lose all composure and become roadkill.

A reason to stick around: Like Bechdel, Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions. When you are feeling your way into new ways of living, she understands, there must be room for error.

Carole keeps Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” as her ringtone because she wants to appear classy and repeats a morning mantra: “I am highly presentable, likable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful.”

Dominique dates an American woman named Nzinga, a “radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder” with epic dreadlocks and a “swamp-diva-voodoo-queen” vibe, only to discover that her real name is Cindy. Cindy is tough; she aims her cultural commentary as if into a spittoon. She’s even tougher on Dominique. Escape will be necessary.

“Girl, Woman, Other” is written in a hybrid form that falls somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo’s lines are long, like Walt Whitman’s or Allen Ginsberg’s, and there are no periods at the ends of them.

There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy. Evaristo’s wit helps, too. Yazz describes herself as “part ’90s Goth, part post-hip hop, part slutty ho, part alien.” We learn how useful a hijab can be when you want to have a hands-free cellphone conversation.

This looseness can detract as well. There is sometimes the sense that Evaristo loves all of her sentences a little bit but few of them quite enough. This essentially plotless novel grows longer, but it does not always appear to grow richer.

There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather settle into the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. You begin to feel you are always between terminals at a very large airport, your clothes and toiletries in a little wheelie suitcase behind you. It’s possible to admire this deeply humane novel while permitting your enthusiasm to remain under control.

A lot of human experience is packed into “Girl, Woman, Other.” Penelope, who hasn’t had sex in ages, thinks to herself: “It had been a long time since she’d been seen in a state of undress by anyone other than the matronly bra-fitter at Marks &amp; Spencer.”

Dominique worries that her penchant for sleeping with blonde women means that she’s been brainwashed by a beauty ideal. Amma turns around in her mind the implied whiteness of a British accent.

Amma’s play opens at the National. Dominique greets her backstage and says, “afro-gynocentricism caused a femquake tonight.” The ground rattles further for another character when she gets the results of a mail-order DNA test.

Identity — artistic, cultural, familial — is slippery in “Girl, Woman, Other.” Yazz gets a surprise when she opens a drawer under her father’s bed. It’s a surprise she deserves. She thinks: “You never know people until you’ve been through their drawers / and computer history.”

This article originally appeared in

'Girl, Woman, Other,' a Big, Busy Novel About New Ways of Living

(Books of The Times)

Once upon a time in America, Toni Morrison wrote in “Beloved,” her masterpiece, the presence of a black face in a newspaper would induce something close to horror in certain readers.

That face wasn’t there for any happy or noble reason. It wasn’t even there because the black person had been killed or “maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated,” because those things didn’t qualify as news. The purpose of the photo had to be more unusual.

Over the course of her long and exceptional literary career, which included the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, Morrison, who died Monday at 88, brought a freight of news about black life in America (and about life, period) to millions of readers across the globe. Much of this news was of the sort that, in terms of its stark and sensitive awareness of the consequences of racism, opened an abyss at one’s feet and changed the taste of the saliva in one’s mouth.

Morrison had a superfluity of gifts and, like few other writers of her era, bent language to her will. Her prose could be lush, or raw and demotic, or carefree and eccentric, often on a single page. She filtered folklore, biblical rhythms, dreams, choral voices and a steep awareness of history into her work. In the best of her 11 novels — these include “The Bluest Eye” (1970), “Sula” (1973) and “Song of Solomon” (1977) — she transmuted the basic matter of existence into profound works of art.

Her spiritual forebears were many, and they were elite. You sensed in Morrison’s fiction the sweep and brooding power of Ralph Ellison, the complicated warmth and riddling wit of Zora Neale Hurston, the explosive intellect of James Baldwin and the bent-shovel cadences of William Faulkner. Yet Morrison’s idiosyncratic music was her own. She was a colossus of 20th-century fiction.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, where her father was a welder, Morrison wrote her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” while raising two children alone. She woke every morning at 4 a.m. to write.

She composed “The Bluest Eye,” she once said, because it was a book she wanted to read. Set in 1941, the novel concerns the life of a young African-American girl named Pecola who has internalized racism, who considers herself unattractive and unlovable because of her dark skin. The novel probes, as Morrison wrote in the foreword to a later edition, “what it is like to be actually hated — hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.”

Like many of Morrison’s later novels, “The Bluest Eye” is told from a variety of perspectives, including an omniscient third-person narrator. In a 1993 Paris Review interview, conducted by the novelist Elissa Schappell, Morrison spoke to the importance of including more than one voice in her fiction.

“It’s important not to have a totalizing view,” she said. “In American literature we have been so totalized — as though there is only one version. We are not one indistinguishable block of people who always behave the same way.”

In that same interview, Morrison commented on the difficulty of some of her later novels, with their nonlinear structures and dense, superheated language. About people who ask her why she doesn’t write books that everyone can understand, she said: “I don’t think they mean that. I think they mean, Are you ever going to write a book about white people?” She added: “I’m going to stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me.”

The center found her. Morrison was that rare critical and commercial success, even before Oprah Winfrey became her steady champion. “Song of Solomon” was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1977, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in 1940.

In addition to the Nobel, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize (for “Beloved”) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for “Song of Solomon”). A 2006 New York Times Book Review poll of 124 prominent authors, critics and editors named “Beloved” as the single best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years.

As a novelist, Morrison understood that some wounds must be reopened in order to heal. She understood better than most the suppurating sores beneath the skin of American life. She also comprehended, in a subcutaneous manner, something that Iris Murdoch put this way: Being nice is not the same as being good.

A great deal of humor floats to the surface in Morrison’s work. (“Laughter,” she remarked, “is a way of taking the reins into your own hands.”) Even more often, she wrote about loneliness. Many of the scenes in her best novels reverberate with desolation. “Pain,” she wrote in her novel “Jazz” (1992). “I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweet tooth for it.”

At the heart of “Beloved” is as indelible a scene as we have had in this country’s literature in the past 50 years. A runaway slave, about to be caught, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw rather than have her returned to subjugation.

Morrison was a sensuous, first-rate writer about many things, not only about race. Her novel “Tar Baby” (1981) is about a love affair between African Americans from separate worlds — Jadine graduated from the Sorbonne and is a fashion model, while Son is impoverished. But it also contains writing like this, about the natural world:

“Bees have no sting on Isle des Chevaliers, nor honey. They are fat and lazy, curious about nothing. Especially at noon. At noon parrots sleep and diamondbacks work down the trees toward the cooler undergrowth. At noon the water in the mouths of orchids left there by the breakfast rain is warm. Children stick their fingers in them and scream as though scalded.”

Morrison had her critics, especially when it came to some of her later novels. There’s no doubt that her prose could veer, at times, toward the pretentious. Her novel “Paradise” (1997) is especially notable for its didactic and purplish patches. Morrison could write a less-than-superb novel without shaking anyone’s sense of her magnitude.

The point of an essay like this one, written in the hours after a writer’s death, is in some regard to blow “Taps” over a meaningful life. It’s a rolling of credits. With Morrison it feels different. The credits are only partial. This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-appraisal.html" id="68279213-f43d-3491-aca7-634736d8c8cf">The New York Times</a>.

Toni Morrison, a Writer of Many Gifts Who Bent Language to Her Will

(An Appraisal)

The more you know about Moskowitz (1921-97), who opened the store in 1959, the Beatnik era, with his wife, Barbara, the more you want to know. He was brusque and a bit of a slob. He drove his sports car like a maniac. One of his former employees has written about his “famous flatulence.”

He was a natural-born agitator. Born in New York City, he realized he missed certain eats while out West. He’s been given credit for bringing real bagels into Berkeley after founding SAWBABA, the Society for the Advancement of Water Bagels in the Bay Area, in 1962.

After he was referred to as a “balding intellectual” in a newspaper article, he founded, in mock outrage, another group: SFDBI — the Society for the Defense of Balding Intellectuals. (Sign me up.) He helped finance albums by Country Joe and the Fish, the Berkeley-based psychedelic band perhaps best known its performance of “I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag,” a Vietnam War protest song, at Woodstock.

I could keep going about Moskowitz. If you want to know more, look for a copy of “Radical Bookselling: A Life of Moe Moskowitz,” a short, fond biography by his daughter, Doris Jo Moskowitz. She now runs Moe’s.

Under her watch the store has only gotten better. It remains a landmark, one of America’s very best bookstores and worth an epic detour to visit. It still feels a bit raffish, in the best sense. Moe’s four floors are packed with more than 200,000 new and used books, with copious sections on academic topics like Medieval Studies and philosophy.

New and used books are shelved together (as dream-bookstores always do it), and the store’s rare book room is a sprawling cabinet of wonders. The store it will most resemble, for Easterners, is The Strand in Manhattan.

The San Francisco Chronicle once put it this way: “India has the Taj Mahal. Berkeley has Moe’s.”

Moe’s began its life on as a small shop on Shattuck Avenue. In the 1960s, it moved to its current location on Telegraph Avenue, four blocks from the University of California at Berkeley campus.

It arrived there during the midst of roiling anti-war and other demonstrations. Moe’s sells a remarkable poster, taken in front of the store, of a protester hurling an object while surrounded by tear gas. The Moe’s logo is clearly visible in the background. Moe’s was known as a place where protesters could hide out for a bit if the action got too intense.

Dissent was in Moe’s blood. When he was younger he was among the picketers arrested in 1945 for calling for the release from prison of conscientious objectors. His sandwich board read: “Federal Prisons — American concentration camps.”

He had a flair for the dramatic. In 1952, Judith Malina, the co-founder of the Living Theater, cast Moskowitz in the first American production of “Ubu Roi,” Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play.

“He was not a beautiful man,” Doris Moskowitz wrote about him in her book, “but a beautiful human being.”

Both generations of Moskowitzs have an eye for talent. Novelist Jonathan Lethem worked at Moe’s for several years. Current staffers Owen Hill and Anthony Dean Rizzuto have edited authoritative annotated editions of Raymond Chandler’s work. The store has several shelves filled with books by store alumni.

“Moe’s is a unique store,” Doris Moskowitz told me. “We have employees who in many cases have been with us for a long time. They really care about the place, and we offer them a lot of autonomy. The many decisions we make don’t come from above — there’s a collective spirit.”

The store, the largest in the Bay Area, has 25 employees and is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The Moskowitz family owns the building on Telegraph.

“The biggest thing that changed since Moe died is probably that we’re a little nicer,” Doris Moskowitz told me. “Early on I would get in trouble with the staff for being too upbeat, for saying hello, for asking customers if they wanted a bag. I was told, ‘You don’t have to ask them, they’re adults!’”

Doris Moskowitz sometimes asks herself, she told me, “WWMD?” (What Would Moe Do?) She makes decisions she can imagine him disagreeing with. It’s her store now. “I did have a dream,” she said, “ in which he gave me the fish eye.”

She isn’t sure that Moe’s wild days are entirely behind it. “I’ve heard stories about people bragging about private moments in the store elevator,” she said. “Perhaps these are just rumors. I have no idea, and I’m not sure I want to know.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/books/moes-books-berkeley.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

(Books Territory): Moe Moskowitz, the co-founder of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, was known for a lot of things: his omnipresent cigars; his appalling dancing (sometimes to Cab Calloway on the store’s turntable); his political activism; and especially the way he held court at the cash register, riffing like Jackie Mason at a Friars Club podium.

The legend of Moe's Books

<h1>(Critic’s Notebook): People who met British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-99) tended to want to describe her. She had big, round blue eyes, strawlike hair and a broad face with high cheekbones. She resembled a lioness or, in one observer’s view, the actress Falconetti in the 1928 silent “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”</h1>

The intensity of Murdoch’s gaze, boring into you from the dust jackets of her many novels, seemed a promise of the books’ contents. For decades this remarkable writer delivered prickly, sophisticated and somewhat unearthly fiction about good and evil and sex and morality. She trailed a large, large muse. She deftly moved her ideas about, positioning them like the slabs used to build Stonehenge.

This year is the centennial of Murdoch’s birth. It’s also been 20 years since her death at age 79. Distressingly, her posthumous reputation is in semi-shambles.

Many of her novels are out of print. Young people tend not to have read her. She is seldom taught.

Well-thumbed Penguin paperback editions of Murdoch’s novels, foxed and sun-damaged, were once staples of Goodwill stores and other secondhand bookshops. These have largely disappeared, in my experience, from circulation. It’s hard to argue with the British writer D.J. Taylor’s contention, in The Guardian in 2014, that “shares in Iris Murdoch are in freefall.”

How did it come to this? In part, it may be that Murdoch was too prolific. Less might have been more. A few of her novels, if not outright duds, are dud-like. The intellectuals and artists and eccentrics in her lesser books seem to be moved like lethargic wooden chess pieces, making you feel like you’re trapped in the lower intestine of some baroque scholarly superstructure.

In part, too, it may be that Murdoch is supremely hard to pin down in nearly every regard. There is her ardent and complicated sexuality, for example. She had many liaisons with both men and women throughout her life, even during her long and happy marriage to the shambling and abstracted English literary critic and writer John Bayley.

(Bayley, who tolerated her affairs, wrote three memoirs about his life with Murdoch. This was two too many. One became, in 2001, the movie “Iris,” starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as the young and older Murdoch, respectively. The poster’s tagline declared: “Her greatest talent was for life.”)

Murdoch was a staunch feminist, and a pioneer in putting complex and believable gay and lesbian characters into novels. But she also wrote six novels from the point of view of male characters (these are, in fact, some of her very best) and none from a woman’s first-person perspective. Nothing about her was ever simple.

Murdoch’s dwindling reputation is painful to behold. To allow her name to fade from the list of the most elite writers in English of the second half of the 20th century is to begin to take our bearings from the wrong landmarks. To borrow a line from Peter J. Conradi, her biographer, “She colonized the century and gave it back to us as myth.”

She was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime — that you have swum very near to a whale.

“All speech is seduction,” Murdoch once wrote, and she seduced on many levels at once. Her novels have a tidal pull. They’re so often about extreme love that if I had to choose a paradigmatic sentence from her work, it might be this one from her piquant and often farcical novel “A Severed Head” (1961): “I would come to her even if I had to wade through blood.”

There is no sense in being a reader (or a critic) if you don’t go where your pleasure takes you. So allow me to speak about my favorite Murdoch novel — alongside perhaps “A Severed Head,” “The Black Prince” and “The Bell”: “The Sea, The Sea,” from 1978.

The novel, which won the Booker Prize, is about a widely known theater director, Charles Arrowby, a kind of aging Mike Nichols character, who retires from London and moves to an isolated house by a rocky sea. He intends to hole up and write his memoirs. Instead his past — his sexual past, primarily — catches up to him in darkly comic ways.

Murdoch wrote “The Sea, The Sea” under the influence of Shakespeare’s comedies, and that influence burns brightly. Murdoch once wrote, “Any high theory about Shakespeare is no good, not because he is so divine but because he is so human.” One could say the same about her.

“The Sea, The Sea” is profound and delicious for many reasons. For one thing, it is a multilayered working out of her feelings about the intensity of romantic experience. “Extreme love must bring terror with it,” she writes. Also: “You die at heart from a withdrawal of love.”

“The Sea, The Sea” also happens to be intelligently and sympathetically concerned with four of my favorite things: swimming, eating, drinking and talking, not necessarily in that order. It is an ideal beach book — especially if you enjoy the cooler and pebblier and spookier northern sort of beach.

Arrowby is hunger-obsessed (“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too”) but in an unusual and somewhat dogmatic way. He likes simple food, homely little picnics, and he often resorts to a can opener.

He complains about haute cuisine because it’s expensive and pretentious and a bore, and we all drink so much we barely experience it anyway. What’s more, it “inhibits hospitality, since those who cannot or will not practice it hesitate to invite its devotees for fear of seeming rude or a failure.”

Murdoch drops offbeat little maxims as she goes: “Basil is of course the king of herbs”; “Only a fool despises tomato ketchup”; “Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.”

Not all of Murdoch’s novels are food-minded. My point is that, whatever human topic she is considering, she has a great deal to say that is funny, pointed, dead-on. She fills us to our ears not just with ideas but teeming humanity. “The Sea, The Sea” also contains a lot of commentary about the theater, and about social class.

Charles, the insecure and unreliable narrator of “The Sea, The Sea,” will make nearly any reader squirm. Were he alive today, he would be a candidate for a bug-zapping #MeToo cancellation. He has slept with (and lied to) many women under his professional control, and some of his comments are plainly misogynistic.

Beautiful women, the morning after, tend to look like prostitutes to him. He also remarks, “There is something strange and awful about the distorted open mouths of singers, especially women, the wet white teeth, the moist red interior.” That sentence, with its obvious sexual panic, should probably be sung to “The Vagina Dentata Cantata,” a made-up ditty in Sigrid Nunez’s terrific novel “Naked Sleeper.”

Myth and magic begin to creep into “The Sea, The Sea.” A writhing monster is spotted in the ocean. Things begin to break and go missing from Charles’ house. He sees strange faces in his windows. Ghosts have risen.

The most sinister ghosts and gods and monsters in “The Sea, The Sea” arrive in the form of real people, however — demons Charles has unwittingly invited himself.

Later in her life, Murdoch said that she found her first novel, “Under the Net” (1954), to be immature. I’ve recently reread it, and it holds up just fine.

In it, Murdoch writes, “To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.” It’s also the definition of a writer worth rereading over a lifetime.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/books/iris-murdoch-centennial.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

On the centennial of Iris Murdoch's birth, remembering a 20th-century giant

This year is the centennial of Murdoch’s birth. It’s also been 20 years since her death at age 79. Distressingly, her posthumous reputation is in semi-shambles.

Vuong returns now with his second book and first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” (It’s the kind of title about which Dorothy Parker might have commented, “Speak for yourself.”) Like his first book, this one is semi-autobiographical and speaks solemnly to his experiences as an immigrant and a gay man.

The narrator of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is known to nearly everyone as Little Dog. He’s a writer in his late 20s, but this story is told largely in retrospect. We learn about his troubled family and youth, and about some occasional ecstasies, sexual and otherwise.

Little Dog’s abusive father is absent. His mother works at a nail salon, smokes Marlboro Reds and has PTSD from the napalm and mortars that fell in Vietnam when she was a child. Her English is poor. She hits Little Dog too often, once smiting him with a box of Legos. This novel takes the form of a letter to her.

Lan, Little Dog’s elderly grandmother, also lives in Hartford. She has schizophrenia and is dying of cancer. Back home, during the Vietnam War, she worked as a prostitute, a bar girl, and was deemed a traitor for her dalliances with the enemy.

Little Dog’s ostensible grandfather, a former American Navy man named Paul, met Lan in Saigon. Paul and Lan are now estranged. Thanks to Agent Orange, he has cancer as well.

This is not Wallace Stevens’s decorous, button-down Hartford. Vuong pins the details of these marginalized immigrant lives, the food stamps and Goodwill stores and Thomas Kinkade images and expensive nighttime ESL classes and trips to the corner store for “cigarettes and Hot Cheetos.”

Vuong is a mightily gifted observer. Gunshots in downtown Hartford sound “like Little League home runs cracked one after another out of the night’s park.” After a day of work in nearby tobacco fields, Little Dog’s hands are “so thick and black with sap, dirt, pebbles and splinters, they resembled the bottom of a pan of burned rice.”

Some lines have the almost hallucinatory exactness of his best poems: “The black wren this morning on my windowsill: a charred pear.” He can also dispatch Lenny Bruce-like wisecracks: “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.”

Vuong’s writing about nail salons, and the way mothers raised their children in them, is moving and rarely less than excellent.

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is, at the same time, filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities. There are enough of these that this novel’s keel can lodge in the mud.

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”

“There’s Mozzicato’s on Franklin, where I had my first cannoli. Where nothing I knew ever died.”

“The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force.”

“They say everything happens for a reason — but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living.”

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation.”

“Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?”

“Deep Purple Feeling” could be an alternative title for certain swaths of this novel. Each of these lines, and this is only a small selection, is a pebble in the reader’s shoe.

The strongest parts of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” where this novel picks up genuine force and has some of the mournful resonance of the Bruce Springsteen song “The River,” arrive in its second half. This is where the narrator details his doomed love affair with Trevor, a boy he meets while both work in the tobacco fields.

Trevor is, in Little Dog’s words, a “redneck” — a slightly older kid who wears a John Deere cap, drives a pickup truck and shoots and skins raccoons. Trevor makes Little Dog, one of society’s invisibles, feel seen. Looking back at Trevor, he thinks: “I studied him like a new word.”

The writing comes in a rush, bliss on the topic of bliss: “I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter underneath the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from the two-hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the county, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on his sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair.”

Speaking of pleasures: About Trevor’s old man, we read: “He looked like Elvis on his last day alive.”

This novel contains some pungent lines in which the narrator, fully grown and a successful writer, seems to push back against those who would admire or blurb his work.

“They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.”

Vuong’s novel is a mixed success, a book of highs and lows. At its best, it’s unleashed in every regard.

‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

This article originally appeared in <a id="c4ce1f8a-f7dc-427c-991e-d54ef8a0b2f0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/books/review-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous-ocean-vuong.html">The New York Times</a>.

'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' captures a young immigrant's troubles and ecstasies

(Books of The Times): Ocean Vuong is a young Vietnamese-American writer — born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford, Connecticut — who made his debut in 2016 with “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” a strong and much-praised book of poems.

Berry is a fiery dissenter from nearly every aspect of modern life. He’s a Kentucky-based farmer, conservationist, pacifist and moral critic who, over the course of his long life (he’s 84), has farmed with horses rather than tractors to remain closer to the land and written longhand so as not to plug another machine into the electrical grid.

The fingers of his writing hand surely have mighty calluses. Berry has delivered more than 80 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

The Library of America last year published a thousand-page selection of his earthy fiction. (A second volume is in the works, as well as a collection of Berry’s poetry.)

Now this estimable nonprofit publisher returns with two slablike volumes of his nonfiction in a boxed set, “What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017.” Together the books weigh in at a forest-pulping 1,674 pages. It’s a lot of Wendell Berry.

It’s vastly too much Wendell Berry, a determined reader soon discovers. Counterpoint Press delivered a saltier introduction to this writer’s work last year with “The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry.” It’s one-fifth the size and, in paperback, about one-fifth the price.

The numbing length of these two new collections do Berry no favors. From the start, he bangs the same themes so relentlessly — the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America’s blind faith in technology — that one’s eyes begin to cross.

It’s not that Berry isn’t correct to be desperately concerned about these issues, and about the loss of old ways and fine workmanship in general. You can be right there alongside him, at least on the big points, while still being driven to madness by repetition. It’s as if someone has put a bag over your head.

Like Henry David Thoreau, one of his touchstone influences, Berry went back to the land — in his case, a farm in Henry County, Kentucky — to live deliberately. Unlike Thoreau, he lacks a certain crucial insouciance.

It is impossible to imagine Berry writing, as did Thoreau, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.” It’s almost impossible to imagine him, like Jefferson, another of his touchstone influences, really enjoying his wine.

Berry’s single-note essays make you recall Carlyle’s comment about Macaulay, that listening to him was OK for a while but “one wouldn’t live under Niagara.”

With the planet rapidly warming and the oceans acidifying, Berry seems more than ever a prophetic voice. Come for the thunder. Stay, if you can, to dip more occasionally into these writings, rummage around on their ocean floor and return to the surface with gleaming fragments.

Berry attended military school, and among his lessons was an observation that seems to presage our current chief of state: “Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence — and you have a tyrant.”

He has always known exactly who he is. “I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed,” he writes. I live in a large city. But I admire his rejection of “the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well.”

He occasionally seizes on a perfect ripe detail to make a point about how we live. “Consider, for an example, President Nixon,” he once wrote, “who advertises his grave concern about the destruction of the environment, and who turns up the air conditioner to make it cool enough to build a fire.”

Throughout these books, whatever it is, he’s against it. He complains about “gleaming, odorless” bathrooms and fancy bassboats and “TV jingles of soup and soap.” In one early essay, he comes out against weather forecasts (!) because they usurp a farmer’s intuition. Berry deplores “the so-called ballroom dancing” because couples, in ring dancing, used to all be together.

He writes, mystifyingly, about the moon launch: “Americans have gone to the moon as they came to the frontiers of the New World: with their minds very much upon getting there, very little upon what might be involved in staying there.” (Roger, Houston, we’ve deployed the sectional.)

Hippies cared too much about their hair and took their drugs wrong. (Better to embrace, he suggests, Carlos Castaneda’s more rigorous and ritualistic methods of turning on.) He’s against the delights of free love in all its iterations, and he takes a dim view of birth control because of its “division of sexuality from fertility.”

He is so opposed to pornography that his prose put me in mind of the title of a great Bobby Braddock album, “Hardpore Cornography.” A man of Christian faith, he is opposed to abortion.

Berry is not unrelievedly pessimistic. He admires some aspects of our current food culture, especially the increasing awareness of where our ingredients come from and the concurrent boom in organic farming.

More typical are sentences that devolve into lists of rural America’s ills: “bankruptcy, foreclosure, depression, suicide, the departure of the young, the loneliness of the old, soil loss, soil degradation, chemical pollution, the loss of genetic and specific diversity, the extinction or threatened extinction of species, the depletion of aquifers, stream degradation, the loss of wilderness, strip mining, clear-cutting, population loss, the loss of supporting communities, the deaths of towns.”

Berry has participated in his share of civil disobedience, but he is against movements. There is one movement he suggests he could enthusiastically support, one to be called “The Nameless Movement for Better Ways of Doing.” Sign me up.

‘What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017’

The Library of America. 1,674 pages. $75.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8a3c5b7e-30d5-4da5-a301-695759f34153" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/books/review-wendell-berry-essays-library-america.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Books of The Times): Every serious writer, I’ve heard it said, has one book whose title seems to sum up his or her oeuvre. For Wendell Berry, that book would almost certainly be “Another Turn of the Crank,” from 1995.

A little earnestness goes a long way

Gabriel García Márquez, “Gabo” to his friends, lived for journalism. He wrote for newspapers and magazines his entire life, and he founded six publications himself. He once said, against the wisdom of the ages, “I do not want to be remembered for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers.”

García Márquez (1927-2014) inhaled fresh ink the way the press critic A.J. Liebling did, as if it were cigar smoke. He called journalism “the best job in the world” and “a biological necessity of humanity.” He understood that newspapers and magazines not only deliver data but that they add, through commentary of all variety, to the gaiety of a society.

A resonant new collection of García Márquez’s journalism, “The Scandal of the Century,” demonstrates how seriously he took reportage and what’s now sometimes called (would Liebling approve?) long-form narrative.

There are intricate, involving stories here about the death of a young woman who seemed to lead a double life; about the 1978 political siege of Nicaragua’s Palacio Nacional by the Sandinistas; and about the international efforts to save a young boy who needed a hard-to-find rabies serum raced to him within 12 hours.

These are articles that, in their confidence and grace, put the reader in mind of “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor,” the García Márquez book, first published in English in 1986, that was based on a series of articles he wrote for a Bogotá newspaper in 1955 in the voice of a Colombian sailor washed overboard from the deck of a destroyer.

Most of his journalism, like most of his fiction, is centered on his native Colombia. So many of the best pieces in “The Scandal of the Century,” however, are essays, unpretentious and witty meditations on topics like barbers and air travel and literary translation and movies.

You get the sense that, were he allowed to start one last magazine from beyond the grave, García Márquez would edit a version of one of those casual publications, like The Spectator, The New Statesman or The Oldie, that the British do better than the rest of the world. Magazines, that is, composed entirely of commentary, the combined contents of whatever is on their columnists’ minds.

“The Scandal of the Century” comprises 50 articles, published between 1950 and 1984. It’s one of two new books that deal with García Márquez’s work and life. The other is “Solitude &amp; Company,” a charming and rowdy if slight oral history of his life edited by Colombian journalist Silvana Paternostro and translated by Edith Grossman.

“Solitude &amp; Company” isn’t meant to replace Gerald Martin’s authoritative 2009 biography of García Márquez. It’s a book that gathers his old friends together, as if around a table, and lets them talk. Few can believe what a big deal their old drinking buddy Gabo turned out to be, how he floated away from them on a nimbus of success. They aren’t quite willing to cast palm fronds in front of him just yet.

García Márquez wrote some of his early fiction on rolls of newsprint that he liberated from his day jobs. Perhaps this accounts, in some small way, for the manner with which his fiction and nonfiction can seem to bleed together.

The articles and columns in “The Scandal of the Century” demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. (Irony was the fan that reliably cooled the intense projector of García Márquez’s mind.)

He wrote his journalism, he said, with “the same conscience, the same joy and often the same inspiration with which I should have written a masterpiece.” The sprinter and the long-distance runner in him were oddly in sync. He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding; he didn’t know how to phone anything in.

He was a world-class observer. Watching President Dwight D. Eisenhower disembark from a plane in Paris in 1958, he noted not just his “wide smile of a good sport” but, better, “his long and sure Johnnie Walker strides.”

Airplanes figure often in García Márquez’s journalism. He hated to fly. About air travel after he became famous, he wrote: “I always fly so frightened that I don’t even notice how anyone treats me, and all my energy goes into gripping my seat with my hands to hold it up in order to help the plane stay up in the air, or trying to keep children from running in the aisles for fear they’ll break through the floor.”

He dilated on writers and their economic hardships. Take cigarettes, for example. “The best writers are the ones who tend to write less and smoke more,” he proclaimed, “and so it’s normal that they need at least two years and 29,000 cigarettes to write a book of 200 pages. What that means in good arithmetic is that just on what they smoke they spend more than what they’ll earn from the book.”

García Márquez’s journalistic influence is still felt. In 1994, he founded the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, better known as the Gabo Foundation, in Cartagena, and it is still prospering.

In a foreword to “The Scandal of the Century,” the investigative reporter and foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson notes the “paradox that one of the most emblematic authors of the Latin American Boom in fiction should also be regarded today as the maximum godfather of a new boom in Latin American journalism.”

The humble García Márquez put it this way: “I am basically a journalist. All my life I have been a journalist. My books are the books of a journalist, even if it’s not so noticeable.”

He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.

Publication Notes:

‘The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings’

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

302 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told With Help From His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls’

Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

Illustrated. 336 pages. Seven Stories Press. $26.95.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/books/review-scandal-of-century-gabriel-garcia-marquez.html" id="7a735cfe-3b2e-380e-a4e7-7a82fc7937f0">The New York Times</a>.

Gabriel García Márquez, Journalist? A Book Revives the Novelist's First Calling

“Spring” is the third novel in a projected seasonal cycle that began with “Autumn” in 2017 and continued last year with “Winter.” The new book is the most political thus far in this earthy and humane series. Its heart is worn far out on its sleeve. It beats arrhythmically somewhere down near the knuckles.

Smith is not going to ride out this tumultuous political moment artistically, as if she were a car parked under an overpass during a storm. She’s delivered a bracing if uneven novel, one that, like jazz, feels improvised. “Spring” is tendentious at times, but it taps deeply into our contemporary unease. It’s always alive.

Some of the things this novel comes out against: Brexit, 24-hour news channels, immigrant detention centers, shrinking library hours, global warming, CCTV cameras, bad manners, giving away your DNA, emojis, private security firms and, not least of all, the American president.

Some of the things it’s for: dissent, old postcards, Nina Simone’s version of “O-o-h Child,” privacy, cigarettes and casual affairs, the art made by Katherine Mansfield and Charlie Chaplin and Tacita Dean, civil liberties, the communion of souls and playing hooky from work.

These are hardly controversial opinions, at least in the world of elite fiction, where conservative ideas scarcely appear except in exaggerated form, spoken by obvious numskulls. No wonder conservative readers are so often driven to the ideological safety of the Tom Clancy aisle.

One of Smith’s characters cracks a joke about “virtue signaling” (a delayed train has “virtue signaling problems”) but this novel is all virtue, all signal, all the time.

Yet Smith embeds her politics in interlocking plotlines that flow like waking dreams, in melodies and countermelodies. Her gifts are such that she nearly pulls this awkward bird aloft.

Her novels are like Mike Leigh’s films or the Mekons’ albums. Some are better than others, but all are the product of a unique and hard-won vision; a vision that’s homely in the best sense of that word. You never doubt you’re in the presence of a serious artist, even when things are going pear-shaped.

“Spring” is largely about Richard, a filmmaker in his late 60s, an old lefty trying to make sense of the new world. The convictions of the #MeToo moment have this basically decent man revisiting, in sleepless, thrashing 4 a.m. moments, flashes of his past behavior.

He frets “about this time or that when he’d thought it was all right to act however he liked to the women he was with. He’d touched many a leg. He’d taken many a chance. He’d been lucky more often than most. No one’d complained. At least, not to him.”

Richard is down on his luck. He needs work, but the only project on offer is a terrible script about the time in 1922 when Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke were in the same Swedish town. In real life, they apparently never met while there. In the script, they have wacky sex on a billiards table, and in a swinging cable car.

Richard is crushed by the death of his longtime collaborator and screenwriter, whom he refers to as Paddy. This novel skips around in time. When we see Paddy still alive, she expresses zero patience for the highbrow-baiting that’s on the rise in Western civilization.

“Don’t get at me for knowing,” she says to Richard. “I’m a dying species, I’m that thing nobody out there thinks is relevant anymore. Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.”

Paddy is also given too much heavy, expository dialogue. Richard hopes to speak at Paddy’s funeral, but he’s turned down by her children. Distraught and borderline suicidal, he boards a train north.

Other characters will board trains north as well. They will ultimately collide with one another. One of these is Brittany, a woman who works at a brutal immigrant detention center run by a private security firm. She’s learned things like “how to talk weather” while “holding someone in headlock.” About her eating habits, we read: “Her favorite food is anything burnt.”

One day Brittany meets and inexplicably follows onto a train a 12-year-old girl named Florence, an orphan who is a kind of savant of justice, like some combination of Emma González, the Parkland shooting survivor and activist, and Leia Organa from “Star Wars.”

Florence somehow manages to slip into the detention center and have the place cleaned up. She pelts the management with questions like “Why, when you bring people here, do you bring them in the middle of the night?” and “Is migrating to another country because you need help actually a crime?”

The paths of Richard and Brittany and Florence align. I won’t say more about what happens, except to note that we learn of a sort of underground railroad, a community of people who help immigrants escape the clutches of the security state.

“Spring” shares certain themes and concerns with the two earlier novels in this cycle, but they needn’t be read in sequence. You can pick them off in any order.

Dwight Garner

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