Category: Book Review

Chemistry by Weike Wang
Knopf, 2017
211 pages, paper, $24.95
 

Early in Chemistry, the unnamed protagonist describes how an atom is mostly empty space: “If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world’s human population could fit inside a sugar cube.” In a way, this brief comment on empty spaces applies to the brilliance of Weike Wang’s debut novel itself. The novel’s narrative suggests more than is stated plainly on the page. It is a book as much about what goes unsaid as it is about what is said. In this way, Weike Wang tells a story full of ambition, loneliness, humor, heart, and naiveté.

I hesitate to describe the plot because of its familiarity. A twenty-something-year-old struggles to complete her PhD, commit to her long-term boyfriend, and withstand the great deal of pressure on her academic success placed on her by her immigrant parents. The protagonist procrastinates, meets with her shrink regularly, and drinks a lot of wine—bottles and bottles of wine. However, the surprise of Chemistry is not in a riveting plot that charts new territory; it is in everything else.

There is something about the protagonist of Chemistry that makes her aimlessness charming. Perhaps it is her subtle intelligence. The novel is written in vignettes, none longer than a handful of pages, most under a page in length. These scenes rarely linger, and a gesture in Chemistry does all the work that another novel might have needed pages of interiority to explain. The precise language at times more closely resembles prose poetry or a braided lyric essay than it does conventional fiction prose. The closest example on the sentence level that comes to mind is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, although at times I felt like I could deduce influences from Amy Hempel and Annie Dillard.

Interspersed between scenes, the protagonist ruminates on the visible light spectrum, refraction, the scientific method, the history of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of other scientific observations. These passages are always approachable and never felt overwhelmingly technical. Sometimes these facts are interspersed while in the midst of a scene, which shows the character’s wandering mind and helps the reader better understand the rationale behind her actions. For example, after the protagonist reveals that her mother knows the Shanghai dialect, which the protagonist doesn’t understand yet also considers the most beautiful dialect, Wang writes:

This braiding of scientific data with narrative allows access to the particular way that the protagonist sees the world and interprets her own thoughts. The intelligence and external pressure put on the character to succeed make her refusal to complete her PhD and accept her boyfriend’s proposal acts of defiance. In a way, the protagonist is rebelling in the only way she knows how—via stagnation.

Stable relationships are few and far between in Chemistry. Yet these strained relationships don’t erupt into emotional outbursts. The conflict is impossible to separate from the protagonist’s identity as a first-generation immigrant who moved from China to America as a child. Her boyfriend needs more than she can give. She can’t even appreciate him fully because “it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon” (192). If her romantic relationship is strained from her Chinese qualities, her familial relationships are strained because she has become too Americanized. Unlike her parents, the protagonist has forgotten most of her birth language and doesn’t have much of a relationship with her relatives back in China. At times she is embarrassed by her mother’s accent and pronunciation, a common thread in immigrant literature. In an interesting reversal, however, both narratives also encourage the protagonist along both continuums. Her boyfriend begins learning Chinese in order to better relate. Meanwhile the protagonist has tremendous pressure to be successful in a conventional sense—a prestigious degree and job—placed upon her by her parents. In this way, the parents are pushing the protagonist further into the American dream narrative. This clash in both sets of relationships traps the protagonist between two worlds, making it impossible for her to fully inhabit one or the other.

Chemistry manages to capture a sense of knowing in the unknown. Scientific facts are approachable in a way that makes you consider whether you always knew the processes of meiosis and that lonsdaleite is a mineral that is “58% harder than diamond.” The whole book feels familiar in the same way, like running into a friendly acquaintance that you can’t quite remember where you met. After saying goodbye, you may find yourself hoping that you stumble across paths again soon, that the atomic empty space isn’t quite so vast.

At the Foundling Hospital by Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
59 pages, hardbound, $23.00

The threads running through Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital are varied enough to provide the topics for a Jeopardy round: music, language and languages, names and naming, identity and origins. And Pinsky’s restless curiosity is mirrored by the various forms these poems assume. There are sonnets, couplet and tercet poems, lists, narrative poems, brief lyrics, and free-associative repetitions. What melds these disparate elements, rendering the book a seamless read, is Pinsky’s cerebral yet human voice.

Taking its cue from the collection’s epigraph from Pindar (“What is someone?”), that voice offers more questions than postulations. Sometimes those questions are explicit, as in “Genesis”: “Where was the kiln, what was the clay? / What drove the wheel that turned the vessel?” At other times the questions are implicit, often involving notions of accepted faith. In “Sayings of the Old” the speaker remembers an acquaintance who “hates the sanctimonious Buddha-goo / But loves to meditate.” And in “Dream Medicine” the speaker recalls a childhood encounter with his father when,

…from the Ford’s back seat,
I asked him, did he believe in Life after Death?
His eyes in the rear-view mirror kind of shrugged,
“I don’t know, probably not,” he said. “Or maybe
Look at it this way: you are my life after death.”

“I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors,” “Creole” begins, an attitude that is evident throughout this book. While Pinsky often pokes and prods at ideas surrounding religious belief, he seems much more interested in people. “The Foundling Tokens” is a beautiful meditation on how the orphaned children were identified by something tangible when they were brought in: “Bit of lace or a pewter brooch, / Identifying coin, button / Or bangle. One crushed thimble, / noted at admission.” The poem expands to include Africans on the slave passage, “the Chinese immigrants / In the dark Angel Island / Internment cells,” and the people who left “a rhyme or name” scraped “Into the very death-compound dirt” of a concentration camp. What did it avail any of them? “…almost never was / A foundling reclaimed, ever.” These poems never flinch from such hard truths, yet they wear those truths lightly, neither celebrating the darkness nor inviting pity in its wake.

Pinsky is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master. Everywhere in this collection I am made aware of a confidence of sensibility and craft, the sense that he can accomplish anything the poems set out to do. Partly that is surely the result of long practice. But there is also generosity of spirit here. The few explicitly narrative poems we do have are concerned as much with other people as they are with the speaker. Pinsky’s impulse is to honor the people who often don’t have a voice, such as the veteran in “Radioman” who matter-of-factly joined another platoon, his having been wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge: “We slept, we ate. / I had another outfit, somewhere to be. / They had a radioman, and that was me.” The abandoned in the Foundling Hospital, his grandmother who delivered wisdom in Yiddish, and childhood friends who have died receive the same fond attention as do Irving Berlin and Ray Charles and God.

There is no axe to grind here, no quarrel with fate (but neither is there complacency). Rather, there is the acknowledgement that the speaker of these poems is corporeal, one among countless. “Procession” begins with a description of the array of telescopes atop Mauna Kea and their ability to travel back through time. Inevitably, that focus leads the speaker to a meditation about our shared human past. “Innumerable names and doings, innumerable / Destinies, remote histories, deities and tongues. / Somewhere among them your ancestor the slave, / Also your ancestors the thief the prince the stranger,” all of them “…traveling a filament of light / Across the nothing between the clouds of being / Into the pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”

The poems in At the Foundling Hospital examine what it is to be human through the microcosm of individual experience. Robert Pinsky—sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent, but always honest and forthright—is our guide. This book is strong evidence that he deserves the respect he is so often accorded.

Please also see our interview with Robert Pinsky.

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth A. I. Powell

Anhinga Press, 2016

108 pages, paper, $20.00

Elizabeth Powell’s Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter is a thoroughly entertaining work about sad things. For instance, in the prose prologue “Autocorrecting the Lyric I” that opens the book, we learn that the poet-narrator is an “Episcojew,” who, though she learned to “pass” according to the demands of the occasion, was once kicked by the Catholic boys on the playground for “killing Christ.” When she was 14 years old, her “cold borscht” father and “finger sandwiches on white” mother divorced, and she was raped by a drunken neighbor, Bill Gottlieb. Concurrent with these events, she discovers that she has a double “snoring and talking and laughing in her sleep” under the bed. She also learns that the source of her parents’ conflict is her father’s rampant philandering (“No more 42^nd Street hookers, no more secretaries!” she hears her mother yelling).

Though this may sound like Too Much Information, Powell makes it entertaining by approaching it primarily through humor and irony. She writes, “It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the ‘I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage. I’m the debutante in the Pogrom.” That last sentence is simultaneously jarring, discomfiting, and hilarious.

Powell’s book is one long poem that explores the poet’s identity and past through concentrating on the figure of the double under the bed, her doppelgänger. This “alter” is called “stepsister, bitch bastard—the roofied one, erased from the storyline.” The double is also a dead twin brother who, as we learn in the prologue, has been literally absorbed by the poet in utero. The doppelgänger becomes the poet’s half-sister with whom the father’s new red-headed mistress is pregnant at his funeral (a fact that the poet learns later).

Metaphorically, Powell’s book itself finds its doppelgänger in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The famous play becomes a virtual template for Powell’s own life: like Willy Loman, her father was an adulterous salesman who died suddenly. In her prologue she says that, like Loman, her father “had eaten the dream and it had made him sick.”  In Miller’s character Biff, Powell sees the twin brother who was incorporated into her own body in the womb.

She also imagines that Willy Loman’s mistress gives birth to a girl whom she identifies with the half-sister that her father’s mistress carries. Powell’s alter merges with Powell’s half-sister and speaks as Willy Loman’s “reckless daughter” in the stunning six-act title poem which ends the book. This figure seems to signal catharsis and resolution, even wholeness, for the poet. She says, “Tell me, Willy, isn’t it true—//daughter sounds like slaughter,/son, the sun.” The doppelgänger is the finally emergent genius of the book.  The poet’s struggle with her is one of the book’s principle sources of vitality.

In many ways, the genre in which this book participates is theater. The book includes acting exercises, references to set design and to the Fourth Wall, soliloquies, and staging directions. Its hybrid of forms—prose, plays, a sonnet sequence, rhyming couplets, and various nonce forms—and its many different points of view are held together by an unforgettable and one-of-a-kind urbane, postmodern, humorous voice and then pulled apart, almost to the point of breaking, by a swirling, centrifugal energy. In “On the Way to the Theatre, Stuck in the Roundabout,” Powell says, “We surrender to the thrashing, thrust all at once to the left side. . . . We are imaginary people becoming real once again by the fever of this throttle[.]”

In this centrifuge of a book, she throws many bites of information at us simultaneously: other highlights include the narrator/poet’s lack of a belly button, fire that used to follow her “like a strange cat,” psychoanalysis, and a deep urge to connect with a God—“I love God this much (see my hands out as far as I can reach) and farther.” Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter has a frantic velocity that is thrilling and at all times under the control of the guiding intelligence of its maker.

Bukowski in a Sundress, by Kim Addonizio

Penguin, 2016

224 pages, paper, $16.00

Mortal Trash, by Kim Addonizio

W.W. Norton, 2016

112 pages, hardcover, $25.95

Dissatisfied with the label “confessional poet,” Kim Addonizio nonetheless owns up to it in the pages of Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin, 2016). “I hope you will forgive me,” she deadpans partway through this funny, lyrical, moving set of essays. “I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life.” Poetry, that “lineated memoir,” serves as but one topic here, from the satirical “How to Succeed in Po Biz” (“It is crucial not to win the major award, because then you might feel too great a sense of achievement. Be a finalist, but not a winner”) to the candid “How I Write.” “Each time, I’m lost,” she admits. “Each time, I wish I hadn’t started down this road.”

Other essays here similarly de-romanticize Addonizio’s writing life without diminishing its psychic and emotional rewards. She recalls a revelatory moment in childhood, being “hurled into tumultuous confusion about the true nature of reality” when she saw how the ordinary word bologna was spelled: “Clearly,” she writes, “there were deeper truths than I realized lurking beneath not only language, but existence itself”(“Best Words, Best Order”).

With characteristic humor, Addonizio goes on to credit another word, libido—part of a rhyme scrawled anonymously on a schoolyard wall—with inspiring her lifelong twin obsessions, eros and language. One of the sharpest essays here, “The Process,” begins as an anodyne craft talk to MFA writing students—the title itself a workshop shibboleth—but after nodding to such writing-program proprieties as “inspiration” and “revision” Addonizio throws down the gauntlet: “maybe what you really need to learn is something else, like how to write a decent English sentence.” Addonizio practices what she preaches. The writing throughout Bukowski in a Sundress is vivid and memorable, the sentences bristling or sinuous as the need arises, qualities readers of her poems have come to expect. Indeed, some passages here have the intensity as well as the verve and wit of Addonizio’s best poetry:

We shelled peanuts from a red plastic basket and sat together
through the late afternoon as the sun lowered itself gradually
over the docks and the boats like a shining woman lowering herself
into a very large, sparkling bathtub. Or maybe like a shooting star
on heroin. Or maybe the sun was more of a golden quaalude, slipping
down the darkening blue throat of the day.
(“Are You Insane?”)

As in her poems, Addonizio’s essay topics range from the quotidian to the tragic: not only flu shots, cocktails, and “How to Fall for a Younger Man,” but also emotionally disturbed family members, single parenthood, and her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Along the way we find plenty to laugh over as well as ponder, from the indignities of online dating to the smarminess of literary critics. (Her book’s title, originally a reviewer’s jibe, is a label Addonizio gleefully accepts.) Such acceptance is necessary to the confessional mode. “I confess to happiness,” she writes. “I confess to grief.” Far from mere rationalizing or hoping to atone for admitted missteps, and just as far from self-congratulation, Addonizio’s dispatches “from the writing life” make clear the emotional ballast such a life requires even as they distinguish one’s art from one’s lived experience: “I confess that a kelson of my creations is love. The poems are not the life.”

This kelson of love turns out to be a preoccupation in Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton, 2016), Addonizio’s latest collection of poems, published nearly simultaneously with Bukowski in a Sundress. More particularly, she is interested in the ways love has so often been poetically construed or codified: Addonizio devotes major sections of the book to revisions of, or responses to, poems by Shakespeare, John Donne, and others. Her tweaking of a famous image or line can honor the original love poem while also addressing the realities of contemporary relationships. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) looms dauntingly over the lover’s complaint in Addonizio’s poem: “I couldn’t compare this to anything / I’m not going to talk about it now.” The speaker laments the miles separating lovers, but just when we think she has achieved some aesthetic, ironic detachment with a joke about remedying the situation (“every airline fare sometimes declines”), Addonizio reminds us that—the Bard notwithstanding—poetry in fact is no match for Time: “Death still has bragging rights / this line has stopped breathing.” The omission of conventional punctuation from the poems in this section furthers the sense of dislocation, unmooring us from the Shakespearean original just far enough. We hear it echoed and renewed.

Mortal Trash trades in such re-workings and reappraisals of poetry’s means, its metaphors and imaginings. As in her prose “confessions,” Addonizio often satirizes her chosen art both to refresh it and to suggest its continuing relevance. “[L]et me not to the pediment of two minds / admit marriage,” a speaker quips in a tweaking of Sonnet 116, the line break here providing an extra satiric bite to the reversal of Shakespeare’s syntax.  The substitution of “pediment” for “impediment” is crucial, the barrier to love in the original reduced to what may be merely a façade of love in Addonizio’s version.

One of the pleasures of Addonizio’s verse is this kind of darkly comic turn, this jab of rueful insight. “Plastic” begins with a grim environmental fact that “trashes,” so to speak, the hackneyed language of love:

A bunch of it is floating somewhere
way out in the Pacific.
If your love is deeper than the ocean,
then the surface of your love is a swirl
of swill, toothbrushes and swizzle sticks
carried by the inevitable current…

Skeptical as they may be of conventional tropes, we shouldn’t overlook that these lines make for wonderful poetry themselves, the vivid image of consumer detritus washing in on the tide of those “s” sounds: surface, swirl, swill, swizzle… Likewise the lines that conclude “Elegy for Jon”:

I wish the sea would stop
swallowing his name, while it goes on
kissing the sand, laying
another cold wreath at my feet.

The swish of the sea is conveyed in those s’s, the low vowels (stop and swallow and on, goes and cold) competing with the high, bright e’s in sea and wreath and feet as if to mimic the internalized tones of grief, a shifting between dirge and keen.

Indeed, nearly every page in Mortal Trash yields its metaphorical and acoustic riches. In “Divine” we see “black trees / hung with sleeping bats / like ugly Christmas ornaments.” Another poem offers “the ROYGBIV” of damp bras laid out to dry. Elsewhere we watch “this slut of a river smear kisses all over / east Manhattan. “Charting the emotions, the “mortal trash” that is the heart, remains Addonizio’s primary concern throughout the volume, but this creative “kelson” of love in her work merges with her gimlet-eyed retooling of tradition at several key points. Perhaps the best example, “Here Be Dragons,” reads as both a map of love’s perils and a kind of ars poetica. “I’m not done with the compass / & I’m still puzzling over the chart,” her speaker begins, then admits to being drawn to the outlandish, even the dangerous. This holds true emotionally (sea monsters and sirens “were my lovers” and “what dragged me down”) as well as artistically, the poem concluding with the refreshing brashness we hear throughout both this collection and her book of essays:

I drank
in the taverns with pirates howler
monkeys my sea captain ancestors my
sozzled staggering fathers & returned
but not to any harbor only the curved
surface I sailed on

If “confessional,” these two books rise above both the typical memoir’s tendency to capitalize on addiction or dysfunction and much of contemporary poetry’s self-defeating rage against coherence. Bukowski in a Sundress treats with candor as well as mordant humor the travails of not only “the writing life” but life, period—this existence we nevertheless are stuck with, and which Addonizio’s poems renew our passion for, mortality in all its awkward, exasperating, despairing, and joyous “trash.”