If your spouse notices an unusually dark freckle on the side of your face and she suggests you might want to get it checked for melanoma, take her advice! My freckle turned out to be a “superficial” melanoma, confined to the surface of the skin, and curable if treated early. Required a half-dollar size excision.
Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press 2022
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Few writers are as honest and uncompromising about their art as Joan Frank. The essays collected in Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading address “writers who’ve been at it awhile.” Readers and writers at any stage will find it both inspiring and sobering to learn that one of her novels, The Outlook for Earthlings, took fifteen persevering years to find a publisher.
Frank disputes the notion that writers and introverts in general are somehow better equipped to withstand the isolating effects of a global pandemic. In “Make It Go Away,” the COVID lockdowns are depicted in all their hallucinatory disorientation. “We’ve had terrible trouble sleeping,” she writes. “We’ve felt spaced out or angry or glum, tired or twitchy, scared or numb or listless…”
She admits to a post-pandemic loss of “clarity and conviction” (“It Seemed Important at the Time: The New Doubt”) and suggests the feeling may be more widespread than we realize. Her cultural analysis is persuasive. Frank’s New Doubt, like Hunter Thompson’s fear and loathing, portends bad vibes ahead:
Why lie about the sad drooly bony smelly Black Dog plopping down upon one’s chest at all hours, groaning and farting in its nightmare-riddled sleep?
Late Work is wide-ranging. Other highlights include an encomium to the practice of letter-writing (“Just anticipating letter-writing is erotic for me—the way approaching a bloc of private writing time and space is erotic”), and a bookstore reading gone horribly wrong (“Gird yourself, earnest artist. When attention comes it will contain naysayers”).
Two essays are devoted to the “now-classic-but-once-unknown” 1965 novel by John Williams, Stoner, about the struggles and muted transcendence of a Midwestern literature professor. “The novel’s arc feels—like all our very greatest art—inevitable,” Frank writes. “Its particulars shine with the relevance of the universal. It is timeless.”
The advice to writers in her essay “What Are We Afraid Of?” becomes advice to anyone feeling unmoored right now. “Despair can paralyze,” she warns. “If we’re paralyzed, nothing gets made.” We must teach ourselves to “shut out the roar.” Joan Frank offers strategies to help us find our way back to doing the work we care about.
The Transcendentalists and Their World
Robert A. Gross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Emphasis on “their world,” meaning Concord, Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century. You will learn tons about manufacturing “the common pencil,” the family business that bored the shit out of Henry David Thoreau. Agricultural and educational reform. Industrialization and railroads. Internecine church discord. The unconscionably slow awakening of the abolitionist movement. Rich in granular census data, court records, diaries, letters. This approach to history—dubbed “new social history” when author Robert A. Gross began championing it in the 1970s—pays bountiful dividends. Transcendentalism’s nonconformity and romantic idealism go nowhere without a receptive “rising generation” seeking countercultural “newness.” Emersonian self-reliance is about bestowing wonderment and dignity upon human consciousness. Gross shows us what was happening on the ground—literally—in Concord (e.g., the cultivation of the Concord grape, and Thoreau’s storied bean-field). The book’s nearly 200 pages of endnotes comprise citation upon citation, and, in the best David Foster Wallace tradition, often include entertaining nested mini-narratives. All of which is to say: Transcendentalism rightfully deserves context, and by God, Gross’s 864-page career-capping masterpiece supplies it.
The Power of the Dog
Thomas Savage
Afterword by Annie Proulx
Back Bay Books 2021 [2001]
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Back Bay Books’ 2001 reprint of Thomas Savage’s 1967 Western novel, The Power of the Dog, with a laudatory afterword by Annie Proulx, brought serious reconsideration to Savage’s largely forgotten book. (Not unlike the rediscovery of John Williams’ Stoner from 1965, recognized only in the last ten years as a classic American novel.) New Zealand director/screenwriter Jane Campion’s adaptation of The Power of the Dog, and its twelve Oscar nominations, should further burnish the book’s reputation. As Proulx writes, “Savage created one of the most compelling and vicious characters in American literature.” That would be Phil Burbank, played with menacing brio by Benedict Cumberbatch. Montana ranch owner, bully, and sexually repressed homophobe. “He is, in fact, a vicious bitch,” says Proulx. Ahead of its time? Possibly. But as a revisionist Western, even an anti-Western, Savage’s novel precedes Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) by a mere four years. Campion gets it. Kodi Smit-McPhee, in one of the best fakeout performances in recent years, seems to consciously echo Keith Carradine’s brief but unforgettable role in Altman’s film as a bumpkin out of his depth. What really seals the homage is Carradine’s cameo as the governor in Campion’s film.
Coffee Spew 