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Below Stephen Elliott, author of the novel Happy Baby, admires John Williams’ Stoner. (And NYRB Classics will send a free copy of the book to the first person who emails me at maud [at] maudnewton [dot] com.)
 

I have a problem with dead authors. I prefer to support living authors and to participate in the conversation each generation has over who should be remembered and what art can be said to represent our time. I’m convinced that writers are still publishing brilliant, necessary books, and the pleasure I get from finding one is more than the pleasure of reading a book written fifty years ago that everybody already knows is great. Nonetheless, I just read one of my new favorite books, by a mildly respected but mostly unknown author, who died in 1994.

The book is Stoner by John Williams. It covers the life of a boy raised on a small farm in Missouri in the early 1900s. His parents send him to the new state school thirty miles away to study agriculture. At the university he falls in love with literature, which places him on path to an assistant professorship at the same school, a position he lands primarily from his refusal to serve during the First World War when university instructors became scarce. Following the war he writes a decent, but not great, book, and has an unhappy marriage that bears him an unhappy daughter.
 

Does this book sound boring? It’s almost impossible to describe any other way. It’s simply the story of a man’s entire life, from the farm to third-tier state college, a handful of minor victories and defeats, and one significant affair the protagonist is not worldly enough to recognize. There are good intentions with bad consequences, gifts that arrive when we least expect them, and finally death.

And yet. . . this book is not boring at all. This book races through the finish line. It is perhaps the greatest example of minimalism I’ve ever read. We often equate minimalism with “show don’t tell” because we pin both to Hemingway. But showing instead of telling and minimalism are not the same thing. Just spend a week reading David Foster Wallace or Tom Wolfe and you’ll know what I mean.

Stoner will pass years in a sentence, stunning the reader suddenly with lines so stark and understated you forget to breathe: “Within a month he knew that his marriage was a failure; within a year he stopped hoping that it would improve.”
 

John Williams is aware of the reader, of the time we are spending together, and treats that time preciously; the book becomes impossible to put down. That’s how we end up with paragraphs like this:

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

It’s no secret that William Stoner dies at the end. We’re told so in the book’s opening:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course.

Yes, I’m prejudiced against dead authors, but Stoner is a story of great hope for the writer who cares about her work. Despite never finding a large audience, this novel was brought back into circulation last year by the New York Review of Books Classics. There were people who loved it so much they wouldn’t let it go, they had to keep this book in print. You could say its resurrection proves, once again, that great art overcomes and ultimately survives.

Below Valerie Trueblood, author most recently of the novel Seven Loves, praises Ian Patterson’s Guernica and Total War, an indictment and examination of war from the skies, just out from Harvard University Press last month.
 

I wonder why in this country we don’t hear the word “wartime.” Here we are in year five of one war and year six of the other. Art is long, but how many of the books on reading lists this summer will last as long as these two wars already have?

Here’s one, by someone whose mind is very much on wartime, and painfully on the men, women and children we try to keep safe by calling them civilians. Ian Patterson’s Guernica and Total War is about bombs dropped onto civilians from the sky. It is short, dense with facts and stories, angry — if anger can be so clearheaded — and profound.
 

After the bombing of the Basque village of Guernica in 1937 (the work of German planes in support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War), the British quickly supplied themselves with the term “frightfulness,” and just as quickly, the word exhausted itself. Then there seemed to be no word for what had been felt, and perhaps that was the beginning of its not being so clearly felt any more.

And in fact where that feeling of horror resurfaces today — it is to our credit that we have a remnant of it — there are always those telling us we’re wrong to think obliteration is the nature and goal of war. War has its rules, the Geneva Conventions exist, and so on. A usually responsible defense analyst told a recent reviewer of Patterson’s book that the comparison of Baghdad to Guernica (which the author makes in his introduction and conclusion) implies that moral progress is impossible in the conduct of warfare. What to say to that. Yes, that certainly would be the implication.
 

The book has much to say to us in the U.S., we who are shopping our way through our wars and finding next to nothing in the newspapers about our bombing runs. But the British, too, get a long hard stare, because of a belief that got its start at the time of Guernica: that this new kind of bombing would demoralize lesser societies — and might reasonably be used by the civilized powers for that purpose—but would never have that effect on them. Needless to say, it took Guernica, a European target, to trigger outrage and sorrow; earlier in the century, few noticed when towns and tribes in Africa and Waziristan were kept under control by British bombs. Of the “natives” disciplined in this way, one flight commander said, “No magic survives a good bombing.”

The frankest and least euphemistic statements from the early air warriors are those of Mussolini’s sons, airmen who bombed Abyssinia in the thirties. Vittorio: “It was great fun.” And Bruno:

We had set fire to wooded hills, to the fields and little villages… It was all most diverting… After the bomb-racks were emptied I began throwing bombs by hand… I had to aim carefully at the straw roof…the wretches who were inside…jumped out and ran off like mad. Surrounded by a circle of fire about five thousand Abyssinians came to a sticky end.

For a while, as Patterson’s book shows us, people did have some sense that a terrible era had begun, congenial to such men as the Mussolini brothers, and worse, to the states that put them in the cockpit. Then came World War II, with its sufferings still being unearthed and explained today. Then came smart bombs. Smart bombs, dumb countries. As for us, so many are fixed on what was done to us on 9/11. The deliberateness of it is a prolonged shock. We can’t, as a population, seem to connect our own shock and misery to that of those just like us being repaid in spades for it. Patterson invokes Martha Gellhorn’s curt term for a mute citizenry: “the led.”
 

Four years after the fact, many of us have forgotten that the U.N. covered up its reproduction of Picasso’s giant Guernica during Colin Powell’s testimony in 2003. Indeed, many of us, including the media, find it convenient to forget that we’re still carrying on two wars.

Patterson’s book deals with the attention artists and writers, in particular, paid to aerial bombardment after Guernica, how they labored to send up into the smoke some signal of their own that things would never be right again. His quietly fierce book takes the reader through the works that made clear what such bombs meant to the people first hearing of them, and shaped much of the end-of-the-world literature of the last century. The “Further Reading” section is a treasury, the list of novels, most of them unfamiliar to this reader, an education in itself.

Maximus Clarke, otherwise known as Mr. Maud, appropriated Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union when it arrived in the mail, and has been raving about it since. He praises the book — a copy of which is available to the 10th person who emails me at maud [at] maudnewton dot com — below.
 

The new book from Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a compelling hybrid: part hard-boiled noir, part alt-history SF, and part literary novel. For the most part, it succeeds on all three fronts — and also stakes a credible claim (alongside The Plot Against America, another what-if story) to being the great Jewish-American novel of the decade.

As a devotee of sci-fi and genre fiction, I found Chabon’s premise as intriguing as anything spun by Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle) and Robert Harris (Fatherland). In the world of this book, there is no state of Israel; instead, the U.S. granted European Jews a special refuge in Alaska (an idea actually considered by FDR). However, the political exigencies of the 1940s dictated that the Settlement Act had a time limit. After sixty years, the Sitka District would revert to full American control, and its residents, never naturalized as U.S. citizens, would be left to fend for themselves in the world.
 

Now the day of Reversion is only months away, and with no clear plan for the future, most of Sitka’s Jewish inhabitants — including its protagonist, police detective Meyer Landsman — live and work under a growing shadow of doom. Landsman, as befits a noir (anti-)hero, has other problems: a tendency to bend the rules to the breaking point, an ex-wife who’s just become his boss, and a family legacy of crippling depression. The gloom is cut, without being dispelled, by the constant stream of brilliantly acerbic insults traded by all the main characters.

The combination of over-the-top existential darkness and Yiddish schtick is so dense that, for the first couple of chapters, the reader may feel trapped in an episode of Northern Exposure scripted by Woody Allen and Raymond Chandler. But Chabon’s assured prose and solid crime-novel plotting keep the narrative flowing, and soon the other elements assume their rightful place as atmosphere.

In classic noir fashion, the crime that incites the story also exposes hidden social strata. Here, it’s the apparent suicide of a heroin-addicted chess player. The death provides the irreligious Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Alaskan-native partner an opening into the secretive, pious, and criminally inclined subculture of Sitka’s Verbover Hasidim.
 

And this fantastic yarn provides Chabon with a unique way to examine controversial realities: the insular and factional elements of Orthodox Judaism, the messianic movement that wants to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and the strange alliance between extremist Jewish and evangelical Christian groups that plays an ongoing role in American and Middle Eastern politics.

In fact, the book’s alternate universe, in which the Zionist movement never succeeds in creating a viable state, implicitly asks us to consider to what degree a state’s actual emergence was inevitable — even prophetically ordained, as some religious believers maintain — and to what degree it was a product of the often haphazard workings of earthly politics.

Such a provocative tale was bound to raise some hackles; Chabon has already drawn accusations of being an anti-Semite. But his love for his heritage is apparent on every page. The clipped, tart quality of Yiddish diction saturates the writing. And amidst individual and collective depravity, the dead chess master — perhaps the tzaddik ha-dor, the “righteous man of his generation” — radiates a sense of true holiness.

After a dramatic turn of events late in the story, the last forty pages of the book feel somewhat anticlimactic. But in the end, it’s still hard to leave the wondrously bleak world of Chabon’s Sitka District — a place that feels at least as real as the mid-20th-century New York City of Kavalier and Clay.
 

For a different reaction, see Sarah Weinman’s “Chabon says it in Yiddish.”

A.M. Homes’ January 2005 New Yorker essay on meeting her biological parents for the first time while in her early thirties is a fine piece of writing — absurd, disturbing, and adamantly unsentimental.

In a waiting room, as she watches her father turn in paperwork for the blood test she’s agreed to undergo, she notices “that his butt looks familiar; I am watching him, and I’m thinking: There goes my ass. That’s my ass walking away. . . . This is the first time I’ve seen anyone else in my body.”

But while Homes is trying to discover something about herself through her parents, they’re busy projecting everyone else onto her: “Ellen thinks I’m her mother, Norman thinks I am Ellen, and I feel like Norman’s wife thinks I am the mistress reincarnate.”
 

Being adopted, Homes has told an interviewer, “causes a dislocation, a kind of fracture that disrupts things.”

Her new memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, mirrors this fractured quality. The first part of the book largely tracks the essay, which holds up well on second reading — so well that it could almost stand alone as a slim volume.

But Homes expects knowing her biological parents to mean something, and the rest of the book is devoted to figuring out what that something is. The tone is detached, shading into brittle. You’ll find the same kind of cool exterior masking the same kind of bubbling rage in much of Homes’ fiction, but, as is the case with Hilary Mantel (whose fiction I’m mad for), what can make for narrative economy and restraint in a novel or short story reads differently in autobiography.

“I found myself weirdly disliking AM during the book,” someone told me. “That can’t be normal in a memoir, can it?” I didn’t feel dislike, exactly, but I did feel very distant from Homes — and coinsiderably more sympathetic toward her adoptive parents than she allows herself to be.
 

In the latter sections, Homes copes with her father’s rejection. She sifts through her mother’s things. She spends hours searching genealogical records online.

The memoir in its contemporary iteration seems to demand a Triumphant Conclusion. Homes, to her credit, mostly sidesteps this trap. The result is a slightly muted finale honoring the mystery of family, and the people who raised her.