After spending a month begging and pleading all of my powerful friends for the new Joan Didion book, Blue Nights, which is out November 1st, I finally managed to get my hands on a copy. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect either. I received it last night after spending an extended weekend with my father for his 60th birthday. Together, we did his most treasured activity, which is to take a mini-road trip to Cape Cod on route 6A. It adds about an hour and a half to the journey but the scenic views are worth it. You pass through the most charming small towns—places you would never want to actually live but enjoy looking at through the window of your rental car—passing small candy shops, immaculate town halls, and oddly named restaurants. Things like this, I’ve learned, make my father happy. They soften the blow of old age and allow him to create new memories.

Didon is nearly 20 years older than my father but both seem to be coming to terms with old age. Approaching the end of your life is the focus of Blue Nights along with grieving the loss of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo. It’s heartbreakingly honest, which is a theme that’s more evident in her later work than in the beginning of her career, and Didion doesn’t shy away from critiquing herself as a parent. In fact she gives many examples in which she felt she missed the mark entirely as a mother. The woman who has made her career out of critiquing everyone else has ended her body of work with a critique of herself. She seems more broken and fragile than ever.

I didn’t mean to draw connections between the book and my own experience with my father but his visit was too fresh in my mind not to. For a long time, my father has alluded to feeling like his life is over. He would say things like, “I’ve had a good life. I feel like I did right by my kids. Can’t complain.” and I would respond with, “Dad, you’re only in your fifties. Chill out.” In reality, however, my father had good reason to feel a sense of finality. In the past two years, he managed to dodge a near fatal case of Swine Flu and beat prostate cancer. On top of that, he also battled a deadly brain tumor over a decade ago. Like Didion, he’s acutely aware of his own mortality.

In Blue Nights and The Year Of Magical Thinking, Didion recalls instances in which she felt disenchanted with hospitals and their standard of care. She needed to be her daughter’s advocate because, as she quickly discovered, things weren’t necessarily going to get done without her vigilance. My father can relate to that as well. When I was hit by a car at 21 years old, I watched my father fight the doctors about their approach to my care. And you know what? My father usually had good reason to be critical. It’s alarming how often things get missed, even in the top hospitals in the country. I often think of where’d I be if he weren’t up the doctors asses while I was drugged on morphine and in a ton of pain. I couldn’t fight for myself. I needed him to do it for me. And he did. Didion’s maternal instinct ultimately couldn’t save her daughter’s life but my father may have saved mine.

You don’t appreciate what it means to be young until the antithesis is reflected back at you. At 60, my father seems to spend more time at the doctor’s office than anywhere else. Getting pre-cancerous moles removed from his skin, undergoing invasive tests to check on his heart, dealing with the fact that he has to pee every three hours: This is the reality of old age. In Blue Nights, Didion recalls times when she felt helpless, when she took a bad fall in her apartment and needed someone to take her to the hospital, getting MRI’s done, sitting in so many hospital rooms, watching her loved ones pass away in an ICU, being treated like an invalid. This is apparently what it’s like when you get older. Didion says, “I realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.” When I read that line, I wondered if my father would agree. I wonder if this is a conclusion everyone reaches in their life. I wonder if we all end up being more afraid of life than death.

What I took away from Blue Nights and the weekend I spent with my father is that life is precarious. We all claim to know this but we don’t truly understand it until it’s staring right at us in the face. When I read this book and when I hold my father’s wrinkled hand on a long drive, I think of moments that will eventually be taken away from me. This might sound bleak but, in actuality, it allows your life to feel so damn special.

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Life is a memoir written by one of contemporary music’s great iconic figures, Keith Richards. It’s nearly 500 pages of extraordinary, crystalline recall crafted into a haunting, polyphonal narrative of many voices: while Richards’ voice is clear, crisp, and dominant, he occasionally lets others tell some of the story – his son, Marlon (named for Brando, yes); his long-time girlfriend and mother of three of his children, Anita Pallenberg; the ice Madonna of the Stones’ pieta, Marianne Faithfull; even that once-elfin model Kate Moss. But, even with the deft assistance of James Fox, a long-time “mate,” Life is a sustained solo. Actually, the memoir, like the life itself, is a high-wire act, an extended, sometimes blinding flash of performance art.

Life is a vivid chronicle of a working-class boy from Dartford, an industrial suburb of London, who would become lead guitarist and songwriter for one of the most successful bands ever. Devoted to music from an early age – he even slept with his first guitar beside him, this Dartford lad pursued his calling obsessively. As a schoolboy he met his future: Mick Jagger. From the 1960s on, they became the nucleus of the Rolling Stones; Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Ron Wood would be the more or less permanent other members of the group and rock ‘n roll history unfolded: in 1964, the year of the so-called “British Invasion” of the States, the Stones launched decades of wild music making laced with over-the-top behavior. And this now 68-year old rocker, who gave the world the likes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Beggars’ Banquet,” “Sticky Fingers,” and “Exile on Main Street,” rocks on.

Life has its predictable – and perhaps ultimately repetitive and numbing elements – yes, there can be too many stories of women (“bitches,” “whores,” “chicks,” and “cunts”), though Richards would have us understand that he never merely consumed women, it had to be something more to motivate him. . . (right); and of drugs and police chases (the latter, in his own words, described as “busts and stray bullets and cars flying off the road’). The accounts of activity in both realms are often comic, at least superficially; but particularly beneath the latter lay a serious problem that landed him in jail (briefly and frequently) and in rehab (a half dozen extended stays before he kicked the habit for good). Keith Richards is a lucky bastard to be alive today.

Several unexpected elements make Life more than your run-of-the-mill aging druggie-rocker tell-all. First, Richards comes across as a serious musician, nearly as obsessed as Flaubert with getting the line (of music, that is) perfect. When he meditates a bit on his calling, he describes songwriting as an attempt “to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts.” Second, Richards’ deep and abiding sense of a base-line loyalty to his mates, observed almost without exception (yes, he did take Anita Pallenberg from his pal Brian Jones; and Marianne Faithfull from Mick) but these are rare and perhaps provoked episodes in the life. That Keith and Mick are no longer so close troubles Richards greatly. This former Boy Scout absorbed a life-long lesson in loyalty from Baden Powell’s boys. Third, and I think the most striking aspect of Life is Richards’ devotion to his family – it is no accident that the memoir virtually begins with an anecdote about his mother and literally ends with a crisp, if slyly comic, account of her death; for Keith Richards it is a mark of distinction to be a self-acknowledged “Mum’s Boy.” That devotion extends to Anita and their children as well as to his wife, Patti, and their two daughters.

Life is a valuable, irreplaceable, first-hand account of over fifty years of rock ‘n roll history, filled with insights about music making and music makers and told by one great high octane artist who emerges from these pages as endearing, if not lovable.

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Paul Auster is perhaps the most accessible writer of those considered to be part of the “high establishment.” And you know the echelon I mean—Roth, Morrison, DeLillo, McCarthy, etc. Yet his new novel, which comes out today, is too accessible, toeing a dangerous line somewhere between the inventive plots of Jonathan Lethem (one of Auster’s own protégés) and the facile sentences of Dan Brown.

In Sunset Park, Auster plays with multiple perspectives. The entire book is told in third-person narration, with each section limited to the mind of a different character. (Except for a strange few pages of diary entries, for which Auster steals the “you” narration from his own previous novel, Invisible. It worked better then.)

The story is about four young people—Miles, Bing, Alice and Ellen—squatting illegally in an abandoned Brooklyn home. But all characters are not equal; the protagonist is clearly Miles, with whom the book opens and closes. It is only Miles whose family drama features prominently. His father, a distinguished book publisher, and his mother, a famous stage actress, are central characters.

The story itself is original and could be charming, but Auster bungles it repeatedly with trademark overwriting and bizarre propaganda for the PEN American Center (of which he is the vice president). When stepbrother Bobby complains about Miles and insults his father, it’s a “rancorous spew of invective.” As Miles listens in on a conversation about himself, he concludes, “They were chopping him into pieces, dismembering him.” It’s all a bit much.

When Bing Nathan considers moving into the Sunset Park house, Auster claims the thought is “emitting a shower of mental sparks that surrounded him like a magnetic field.” It’s a sentence that a creative writing student might come up with.

The same issue damages the dialogue. Auster seems to have left in every modifier he can come up with. Where was the editing? When father Morris and stepmother Willa discuss the sad change they’ve noticed in Miles, Willa declares: “I shudder to think about the future.” Morris then reminds her that Miles was raised by a nanny, describing the nanny thusly: “Edna Smythe, the luminous, legendary Edna Smythe.” Normal human beings don’t talk like this. That clause with “the luminous, legendary” would make sense in a written description, but not in what’s meant to be spoken dialogue. It reminded me of something B.R. Myers wrote in his now infamous 2001 “Reader’s Manifesto.” Quoting one of the worst bits of dialogue from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (a character asks her husband “What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”), Myers points out, “No real person would utter those last two questions in sequence.”

When Miles returns to New York from Florida, the story heats up and for nearly a hundred pages there isn’t much to complain about. Auster takes quite a while to settle into his own story, but once he does, it’s worthwhile. The man knows how to spin a good yarn. The book’s emotional core is the pain that the past has wrought on Miles and his father, but the other Sunset Park squatters are likeable enough to be compelling as well—though Ellen is a far stronger female character than Alice.

Bing, meanwhile, runs a repair shop called “The Hospital of Broken Things,” which just as easily could have been the title of the novel. The characters are the broken things, and it is each one’s inner turmoil that gives the plot strength—each of the squatters has experienced, and is gradually dealing with, their own personal pain.

Pain, both of love and of loss, is a subject that brings out Auster’s best writing. A funeral scene midway through is especially moving; the brother of the deceased “performs an unaccompanied, dirgelike rendition of a Cole Porter song… that is so drastically slowed down, so drenched in melancholy, so painful to listen to that most of the gathering is in tears by the time he comes to the end.”

The book’s worst offense, for me, was the presence of a 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives, running through the plot more like a red herring than a finely woven thread. The movie is not merely mentioned, but parsed to the point of absurdity by the characters, each of whom loves it or hates it or happens to have just watched it for the first time. The movie must be a favorite of Auster’s. On more than one occasion, pages upon pages are devoted to detailing the plot, characters, and even personal histories of the actors. But a veteran scribe like Auster ought to know that even in a novel, and even to the end of making an elaborate analogy, there are some conversations between fictional characters that need not be recorded so dutifully.

The obsession devoted to the movie is another sign of Auster’s lack of restraint. His rampant zeal is indulged again when, after many months apart, Miles’ girlfriend Pilar (with whom he is only allowed to have anal sex, by the way) visits New York.

Recounting their fun as though it were the catalogue of battle heroes in The Iliad, Auster repeats the phrase “the joy of” 36 consecutive times. Only twelve pages later, he does it again in Ellen’s section. As she paints nude figures and ponders anatomy, the phrase “the human body” begins 21 sentences in a row.

There are other similar gimmicks, but the plot takes over, as it does with so many Auster books, and distracts the reader from the novel’s flaws. Once Miles reunites with his parents, the story strengthens for a number of reasons, the best of which is a surprising, plausible disruption in Morris’ second marriage, caused by infidelity.

For those that don’t mind a little cheese with their whine, the corny PR for the PEN organization and the overwritten descriptions will not be enough to ruin a heartfelt story pulsing with well-sketched characters. And although the book’s signoff is a two-page, single-sentence crescendo that seems to be shooting for Ulysses greatness (“yes I said yes I will Yes”), and even though that final sentence mentions that freaking movie yet again, we are left feeling good about the time spent, and missing Miles Heller.

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I came across Knut Hamsun’s Hunger by chance. I’d been reading detective fiction. Detective fiction is good for me. It’s not too charged with emotion, romance, or inner turmoil. Well, anyway, that’s how I choose to look at it. Pages have been written on the subtleties of the hard-boiled school, but I’m in it for fun. I had finished Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. I felt anxiety over what I would read next, because my choice of reading material is crucial to my mental well-being. I have to be properly distracted from myself, which is a constant struggle.

I went to the library and sought out something by Dashell Hammet. Next to a collection of his stories I noticed Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, a book I’d heard about a while ago. I checked it out.

There are many ways I might react to a story. A depressing tale can make me feel that there are bigger emotions than the petty ones I cling to. That’s a nice feeling, really. I don’t find it happens anymore. More than just empathizing with the emotions in a story, I relate to them. I give my own emotional life a lot of credit now, and a depressing film or book that resonates tends to reinforce despair and fatalistic thinking.

Hunger‘s tale of a starving, unemployed writer going mad might seem like an inappropriate choice in reading material for me; when I started it, I was unemployed and just beginning to write articles again. The job search was increasingly discouraging, and I felt on the verge of losing it. Whether inappropriate or not, the timing was perfect, because Hamsun’s narrator spoke to my nervous, depressive condition.

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Hamsun’s novel is fascinating for the way it charts the wanderings, whims, frustrations, and struggles of an unstable yet intelligent mind. The novel was published in 1890, but its delicate rendering of mental states anticipates modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Hunger has very few story elements: the narrator (we never get his name), we glean, is an intellectual living in what is now Olso in Norway. He is broke and starving. To make money, he sells articles. Nonetheless, most of the time he is without much hope. He has moments of optimism, extreme nervousness, anger, frustration, depression, and insanity. He has proud moments and low moments. The “story” of the novel is the narrator’s experience with these sentiments and, basically, his struggle to keep going. But except for the very end of the novel when he leaves Olso to work on a boat, the narrator doesn’t actually go anywhere, at least figuratively; what he does do is experience these range of sentiments, which change moment to moment, all the while trying to figure out how to survive. The same basic scenario is repeated over and over again throughout the novel: the narrator is starving; his condition worsens; somehow or other he manages to get just enough money or food to survive; briefly things are okay; his condition worsens…and so on. He lives in a kind of self-perpetuated stasis.

The depressive mind struggles with itself, rationalizes with itself, adopts stances, latches on to anything that might give it some encouragement. It’s an endless loop of internal dialogue that both tires us out but also keeps us going. Moments of optimism sometime appear; a certain thought seems to bring a glimmer of hope, for some reason or another. A certain way of viewing the situation makes things seem a little brighter. Then something else is triggered, despair seems to be coming on, the struggle begins again.

Hunger speaks to his constant, exhausting dialogue that goes on at one time or another, I’m sure, in all of our heads.

“As soon as I was wide awake, I took to thinking, as I always did, if I had anything to be cheerful about today.” That is a very good question for the morning – what will he do with himself? Hunger‘s narrator has a lot of time on his hands and only the necessity of keeping himself alive to give his days a purpose. The novel might be considered a tale of a man figuring out how to pass his time, because aside from his writing, our narrator has nothing to do other than to just try and get by. Except during times when he has money, which make up very little of the novel, the narrator struggles through each day, trying to write, moving from place to place, dozing on park benches, and scheming about ways to find food. Because of all this free time the narrator faces, there is a lot of time for him to think; as such, the novel becomes about his mental life.

The narrator of Hunger has a delicate temperament that changes frequently and rapidly. Sometimes, external stimuli can be inspiring. Early in the novel, for example, the traffic noises uplift his spirits: “The traffic noises on all sides cheered me up immediately, and I began to feel more content and at peace…A rare and delicate mood, a feeling of wonderful light-hardheartedness had taken hold of me.” One common bit of advice given to those who are depressed or anxious is to go out for a walk and concentrate on the visual and aural stimuli in order to be distracted. It is quite an irritating bit of advice, because the charm of a nice day or some picturesque foliage can easily be interrupted by one thing or another. Soon enough, a man limping ahead of the narrator inspires his ire, and his “rare and delicate mood” drops off: “I walked on, looking at this tedious creature, and became more and more full of rage at him; it was clear he was destroying my good spirits bit by bit, little by little dragging the pure and magnificent morning down to his own ugliness.”

Hunger, despite it’s bleak subject, is often a comical novel. The narrator expresses a lot of indignation. I love this word: indignation. It really expresses what we feel after a long bout of despondency. Things seem all out of sorts, unjust. But what is this indignation directed towards? The world? The worst thing is that there’s nothing really to direct it towards – except perhaps our own nature, which only inspires more indignation.

The indignation expressed in Hunger is a source of humor because it comes from an unstable mind with a warped and inconsistent perspective on things; these moments make up some of the novel’s most amusing passages. The narrator describes the same old man who is destroying his good spirits as “a huge humping insect determined to make a place for himself in the world by force and violence and keep the sidewalk all to himself.” Here, the narrator is hyperbolic, but not necessarily off base. Slow people are forever frustrating – especially the kind that work at parking garage ticket booths. They always inspire indignation. At other moments, the narrator expresses indignation that comes from a place of insanity. Near the end of the novel, a potato cart is passing by on the street and our narrator refuses to believe what he sees: “A wholesale grocer’s cart came by, and I saw it was filled with potatoes, but out of fury, from sheer obstinacy, I decided that they were not potatoes at all, they were cabbages, and I swore violent oaths that they were cabbages…” The narrator’s choler ranges from a bit excessive to insane. What is masterful about these expressions of anger and frustration is that they come from an intellectually rich yet chemically imbalanced mind faced with a world that it doesn’t know how to live in.

To rid himself of the old man, the narrator approaches him and discovers that he is a beggar. Without any money to offer, he quickly runs to the pawn shop, sells his waistcoat, and then offers the beggar some of the money from the sale. This example is just one of many instances where the narrator gives away money even though he is starving. The beggar looks at him like there’s something wrong. “What was he standing there staring at? I got the sensation that he was inspecting my trousers particularly, and I became irritated at this impertinence. Did this old man imagine I was really as poor as I looked? Hadn’t I just as good as begun my ten-kroner article? On the whole, I had no fears for the future; I had many irons in the fire.” Of course, he is as poor as he looks, and the irons in the fire don’t amount to much. But our narrator’s estimation of himself is about as inconsistent as his temperament, and while at times he seems delusional, usually he is painfully aware of his own destitution.

Our narrator grows more irritated: “I stamped my foot, swore, and told him to keep it [the money.] Did he think I intended to go to all this trouble for nothing? When you came down to it, I probably owed him the money, I just happened to remember an old debt, he was looking at a punctilious man, one honorable right down to the fingernails. In short, the money was his….Nonsense, nothing to thank me for, it was a pleasure. Goodbye.”

Our narrator operates under a strange mixture of pride and twisted logic. What starts as irritation with the old man ends with his odd tendency (there are countless examples) to give when he really has nothing to give. He rationalizes his actions by imagining that he actually owed the old man something. That is probably not the case. Intelligent and self-conscious, our narrator has to somehow justify to himself his strange actions; otherwise he would be totally insane, incapable of self-knowledge. Often, his actions are justified by his proud nature; or, alternately, his proud nature makes him all the more frustrated with himself when he does something that is not honorable in his estimation.

As for the prose, this passage poses an interesting question. Who is the narrator talking to? Other than to himself, for who is he justifying his actions? The old man? Us? “Nonsense, nothing to thank me for, it was a pleasure. Goodbye” – are these just thoughts, or are they spoken aloud? There are no quotation marks to indicate dialogue. Perhaps they exist in a space between reality and the narrator’s consciousness. Or they are part of the narrator’s recollection of the event; they represent what he had wanted to say, but did not.

Sometimes, the simplest things like taking a walk or sitting on a bench can be a huge trial; there’s just so much going on in our heads keeping us from enjoying anything or even getting some productive thinking done. A thought pops up and cues up a range of associations, and all of the sudden we’re struggling not to let our minds get to us. After a while, it gets out of hand – how can we possibly be thinking of these things, why can’t we just be in the moment or think about something that doesn’t upset us? The problem seems to be solitude; in the absence of other people we can talk to, we only have ourselves and our thoughts. Hunger‘s narrator rarely interacts with people other than to exchange a few words. He only has his own thoughts to occupy his mind:

I could not sit down on a park bench by myself or put my foot down anywhere without being besieged by tiny and pointless events, absurd nonsense, which forced itself into my brain and scattered my powers to the four winds…what was the matter with me? Had the hand of the Lord reached out and pointed at me? Well then, why me? Why not just as well some man in South America?

Hamsun’s narrator frequently expresses his indignation towards God. It has to be directed at something. He can’t get anything done; his thoughts stop him. Hamsun shows that one’s inner life can be filled with turmoil, struggle, and mental activity, even if very little is happening.

In one passage, Hamsun conveys the way distractions work on a mind and the way a train of thought moves. The narrator attempts to write, but fails, and leans backward on a bench in the park:

In this instant, my head was so clear that I could follow the most difficult train of thought without any effort…I noticed the tiny leaping movement my feet made every time my heart beat…At that moment a strange and fantastic mood came over me which I had never felt before—a delicate and wonderful shock rain through all of my nerves as though a stream of light had flowed through them. As I stared at my shoes, I felt as if I had met an old friend, or got back some part of me that had been torn off: a feeling of recognition went through me, tears came to my eyes, and I experienced my shoes as a soft whispering sound coming up towards me. ‘Getting weak!’ I said fiercely to myself and I closed my fists and said ‘Getting weak.’ I was furious with myself for these ridiculous sensations, which had overpowered me even though I was fully conscious of them.

The narrator’s mad thoughts overpower him even while he is aware of their influence over him. He becomes just as angry with himself as he does with God in the earlier passage. Indeed, who do we blame for our internal struggles? They are our thoughts that take control, after all.

To get by, we have to adopt different stances towards our lives and try to see things from new perspectives. That’s what I try to do. It’s a way framing the situation to make it seem more tolerable; it’s also a way of battling the darker side of ourselves, which can push us towards despondency. In other words, we tell ourselves things that make life seem, at least, okay. Hamsun’s narrator, when he’s not despairing, tries his best to convince himself that things are looking up. These moments are also a source of amusement; we know that his reasoning with himself is ludicrous and that his positive outlook is transient. When he leaves the room he holds in the beginning of the novel, for example, he reasons with himself that it is a step forward, even though he has nowhere else to stay: “In short, this room was simply not furnished in a way appropriate for intellectual effort, and I did not intend to keep it any longer. I would not keep it any under circumstances! I had been silent in this hole and stood it here and stayed on here too long already.” The exclamation point really adds a nice touch. The narrator feels proud about leaving the room, as it were a good thing. He feels certain that he’s “saved” and has nowhere to go but up. We should be wary of thinking there’s nowhere to go but up; if things go down the disappointment is all the more severe.

The narrator even justifies not eating: “I told myself that if I did eat food now, my head would get upset again, I would have the same feverish brain and ridiculous ideas to deal with. I simply couldn’t take food, I wasn’t made that way; that was one of my characteristics, a peculiar thing with me.” Eating can be a chore sometimes, it’s true. The logic in the narrator’s thinking is flawed and it works against him. He doesn’t want to eat because it will prevent him from writing, yet he’s writing in order to make some money and eat.

So it becomes increasingly clear that Hunger‘s narrator perpetuates his condition of starvation and misery. He puts himself through these trials. Sometimes he knows it, but that doesn’t make his thinking any less troubled. After sleeping in the forest surrounding Olso, he feels good about himself, despite the fact that it was a terrible experience: “After I was some distance away, I grew more and more glad that I had won this severe test. The awareness that I was honorable rose to my head, filled me with magnificent conviction that I had character. I was a white beacon tower in the middle of a dirty human ocean full of floating wreckage.” With this instance, our narrator both rationalizes the low point he reached (sleeping outdoors) and gets to root of his troubles – his sense of honor. Guilt might be added to that too; when he receives change accidentally from a grocer and takes it without saying anything, the incident haunts him so much that eventually he concludes “I had been without the slightest doubt happier before, while I was walking around suffering in honor.” To alleviate his feeling of guilt, he gives away the money to a cake seller on the street.

But our narrator is inconsistent. Later in the novel, with nowhere to write, he decides to go back to the boarding house where he was kicked out earlier in the day for not paying. He knows going there would be humiliating, but assures us that, “Pride was not one of my faults; if I might make such a large generalization, I would say that I was one of the least arrogant creatures that had ever existed to date.” It is as if he’s trying to convince us and himself that his actions are sensible. Part of the novel’s appeal comes from the fact that they’re not. At the boarding house, he’s kicked out again, but happens to receive an envelope filled with money mysteriously sent to him. His pride, which he claims is not one of his faults, is wounded; he throws the envelope up at his landlady, and indignantly tells us that, “That is what I call the proper way to behave! Say nothing, not even write on the envelope, just quietly crumple it up and throw it right between your enemy’s eyes! There is an example of someone acting with dignity!”

Eventually, when things seem really bleak, our narrator realizes that his sense of honor is making things worse. He makes the valuable insight that “I always had to go around thinking I was too good for everything, shaking my head condescendingly and saying no, thanks. Now you see where that leads me: here I am again tossed right out on the street.” He clearly has a high level of self-awareness, as unstable as he might be. With this sentiment in mind, our narrator decides, out of desperation, to return to the street cake seller to whom he gave away his money earlier. He reasons that, actually, when he gave her the money he was paying for cakes he would later claim: “I explained why I had given her the money, and explained it calmly and precisely: I had a habit of conducting myself in this manner because I believed in humanity. Always, if anyone offers me a contract or an IOU, I shake my head and say, no, thanks. That is the way I am, it’s true, so help me God.” In other words, what started out as an act based on the narrator forgetting his sense of honor and acting on necessity is warped into yet another honorable act. He grows hostile with the lady; his temperament becomes especially unsettled, and makes a scene out on the street, noting that “it seemed to me I had come out far superior in that exchange.” Aside from leaving Olso on a boat, this is the narrator’s last act, and assuredly if he stayed in Olso he would soon regret his behavior towards the cake seller.

The only thing the narrator does which does not perpetuate his starvation is to leave Olso. He makes this decision more or less arbitrarily, as if it could have come at any point in the novel. The viscous cycle stops. We imagine that it could not have gone on much longer.

One of seven children, and the last of six daughters, born to Lord and Lady Redesdale in 1920, Deborah Mitford (the Hon. Deborah Freeman-Mitford before her marriage), has written her memoirs, a veritable catalogue of eccentrics (don’t the English just specialize in nurturing outlandish characters who would be imprisoned or institutionalized in other countries ?) and a chronicle of twentieth-century life viewed from a posh perspective, if ever.  Lord Redesdale, described by his daughter as “impatient, intolerant, impulsive, loyal, courageous, loving, fastidious, unread, and possessed of great charm,” dominates the narrative of her early years; “I was my father’s favourite. . . we saw eye to eye about everything,” she writes.  Well, perhaps not everything:  he had read, he said, only one book in his life, Jack London’s White Fang, and found it so extraordinary that he never read another, fearing that nothing could measure up.  And speaking of measuring up, one wonders, despite the spin given to Deborah’s 60+ year marriage, if the stress and tensions that ramified throughout the course of that union were not in some measure due to the husband’s failure to meet the “standards” set by the father.  The portrait of Lady Redesdale seems to have been done with a revisionist brush; contrary to received opinion that she was vague, undemonstrative, and detached, her daughter presents her as assertive and loving, with an intuitive connection to each of her daughters.

The Mitford family

With scant education – some lessons from “Muv” (Mother), a little day schooling, and a couple of months at a curiously named London finishing school, the Monkey Club, Deborah was presented at Court, then married Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1941; because of the death of his older brother, the heir (married to JFK’s sister Kathleen), Andrew became the eleventh Duke of Devonshire.  The couple took possession of Chatsworth, the Devonshire seat in Derbyshire, a musty, crumbling pile of some two hundred ninety-seven rooms with hundreds of staff for the house and extensive grounds.  Chatsworth, by the way, was but one of seven properties in the Devonshire portfolio.  And so it began. . .

Deborah’s older sisters had already established themselves, after a fashion.  The oldest, Pamela, married and led what seem closest to an ordinary life, though that may need qualification:  she married Derek Jackson, described by Deborah as “vital, generous, courageous, bisexual, unfaithful, unpredictable, rich… rude.”  She goes on to say that “when she [Pamela] became pregnant he took her to the north of Norway and drove for miles over bumpy roads with the inevitable result of a miscarriage.”   Unity (“always the odd one out,” says her sister), fell madly in love with Hitler and, when Britain declared war on Germany, she shot herself in the head with a pearl-handled revolver in a Munich park, causing irreparable brain damage.  Diana, the great beauty of the family, had married Bryan Guinness, heir to the Irish brewing fortune and had two sons by him, only to have an affair with the already-married Sir Oswald Mosley, infamous leader of the British Fascist Party; both were imprisoned during World War II because of their outspoken politics laced with distasteful racist rant.  (Diana, was, as they say, a piece of work:  interviewed late in life, she refused to condemn Hitler, admitting that “he did have a sense of humor, you should have seen him mimic Mussolini,”).  Nancy, ever disappointed in love, turned her talents to writing, publishing several novels as well as acclaimed studies of Voltaire, Mme de Pompadour, and Louis XIV as well as an admired translation of Madame de LaFayette’s Princesse de Cleves. Twice Nancy took it upon herself to inform the English authorities that her sister Diana was a danger.  Jessica, after marriage to a cousin who died in the war, emigrated to the United States where she joined the Communist Party and became a journalist still remembered for her muckraking account of  the funeral industry, The American Way of Death. Tom, who would have succeeded his father as Lord Redesdale died in the war; like Diana and Unity, he was an ardent Fascist and admirer of Hitler.

Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela Mitford in 1935

Thus, what you get in Wait for Me! is, from one perspective, a family story, the narrative of a rich and long life lived at the upper reaches of the English aristocracy.  The Duchess has been a confidante of the Queen for many, many years, and that has certainly given her access to the great and (perhaps) good – Harold Macmillan (“Uncle Harold,” by marriage), Prime Minister and Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Winston Churchill; the Kennedys (old Joe and Rose as well as the girls and boys of the clan); LBJ and Lady Bird; Prince Charles and Camilla.   The list goes on and on – but it’s never name-dropping, just part of the life.

Eccentrics abound, among them:

Evelyn Waugh:

The phenomenal amount of drink that the writer downed made him tricky company and, as I was still shocked by drunkenness, I kept my distance.  One night he poured a bottle of Green Chartreuse over his head and, rubbing it into his hair, intoned, ‘My hair is covered in gum, my hair is covered with gum,’ as the sticky mess ran down his neck.

Dame Edith Sitwell:

On another occasion when we lunch at Renishaw [the Sitwells’ house], she wore a feather hat and long fur coat that she never unbuttoned.  She told me that the chief things she remembered her mother saying were, ‘We must remember to order enough quails for the dance,’ and ‘If only I could get your father put into a lunatic asylum.’

Sir Edwin Marsh:

For exercise, Eddie tossed a pack of playing cards on the floor and picked them up one-by-one.

Some of what appears in Wait for Me! may raise the hackles of democratically-inclined American readers who have little patience with some of the quirks of the English aristocracy.  One of the most irritating, perhaps, is that of giving everyone in the group a nickname and using it consistently:  Deborah refers to her parents as “Farve” and “Muv,” never “Father” and “Mother”; to her son, Peregrine as “Stoker”; and she gives us the names assigned to all her siblings as well, including her own, given by Nancy to reflect her estimate of Deborah’s intellectual development in chronological terms:  “Nine.”  (The late Queen Mother was known as “Cake” and the Prince of Wales as “Friend.”)  Perhaps even more irritating are the sheer excesses of the aristocratic lifestyle: the endless rounds of parties, balls, hunts; the palatial houses: life lived well over the top.  In 2009 “Stoker,” the present Duke of Devonshire gave a party for nine hundred ten guests at Chatsworth.

The woman who emerges from this memoir is both remarkable and complex, off putting and endearing, irritating and admirable.  Remarkable, given that her birth was largely ignored and she knew it:  as she notes, “my parents’ dearest wish was for a big family of boys; a sixth girl was not worth recording. . .no one, except Nanny, looked at me till I was three months old and then were not especially pleased by what they saw.”  An inauspicious, if not damaging, beginning for one who has achieved a good deal – marriage, children, the efficient overhaul of a grand estate into a self-supporting operation employing hundreds of local folk, life-long devotion of friends, and nearly a dozen books to her credit.

Complex, too, yes – with the slight hauteur perhaps appropriate for the Duchess persona she’s inhabited all these years, Deborah Devonshire suffers no fools, takes no prisoners, one feels.  A certain spikiness comes out, most often when appropriate.  Those a little too grand are dispatched.  Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, visited Chatsworth, and she found him a difficult guest, disappointed perhaps that the company wasn’t grand or intellectual enough; “I was thankful when the time came for him to leave and take his cold eyes and unpleasant personality with him,” she writes. Journalists get it too.  One who asked her about her experience of World War II heard her tell of the loss of her only brother, her husband’s brother, a brother-in-law, and her four best friends.  At the conclusion of that painful narrative, the journalist asked, “So. . .did the war affect you in any way?”

Leave it to an American to take the Duchess herself down a few pegs.  At the White House with JFK and two male friends, dinner was preceded by drinks in the gallery; dinner was announced and, she writes, “. . .being the only woman and a foreigner, I went without thinking to the open door.  On the threshold Jack threw out his arms and said, ‘No, not you.  I go first, I’m Head of State.’”  Discovering her flight from D.C. to New York was scheduled for the same day as his, he set her straight, if she had any thought of sharing the ride, “I go presidential, you go commercial,’ he said, putting me in my place.”  Perhaps he knew that years before, after dancing with him at a ball in London, she’d returned home and written in her diary, “Rather boring but nice.”?

The Duchess does have a sense of humor:  “When Lord Carnarvon came to shoot, I kept a loaded water pistol by my place at dinner and if the talk got altogether too much, I threatened his velvet jack with a short sharp shower.”    In 1957 her last child, Sophy, was born.  Deborah had lost three stillborn children since the birth of her first daughter:  “The fourteen-year gap between Emma and Sophy sometimes caused people to ask, ‘Who was your first husband?’”

In the end, we have not just a sketch but a portrait of a remarkable woman – devoted, observant, discreet (she writes of her husband’s severe alcoholism and its nearly breaking the marriage but not of his infidelities; asked in an interview if he had been unfaithful, she snapped, “Oh yes, of course.”), and loyal to her own.  She clearly has a talent for friendship.  Her occasional class and family loyalty involves some myopia (defending her sister Unity, she writes, “she was not the only English girl to fall for National Socialism… we knew the bad side, we knew she had condoned Nazi cruelty and that she had taken a flat from a Jewish couple who had been evicted; yet. . .there was something innocent about Unity, a guileless, childlike simplicity that made her vulnerable and in need of protection”) and her narrative of that tea with Hitler is curiously – but typically – lacking in censure or even mild disapproval; it ends thus, “Looking back, what is surprising is that he postponed his departure for two hours so as to be able to sit and chat to Unity and though her, to us.”  Looking back, what is surprising is that she spent time with the satanic monster who would maniacally seek to destroy the Jewish people, slaughtering at least six million of them and countless others in his megalomaniacal quest to achieve his warped vision.

Deborah Devonshire has taken to herself both the gifts of privilege and the considerable burdens placed upon her – whether the care of a difficult, failing husband or the supervision of a very large household, really a corporation.  She has suffered the loss of three children, family and friends in war, and the considerable vicissitudes of aging (she is now nearly blind) without complaint, without self-pity.  Never the victim, she has carried on, always rising above it; and now, at age ninety, having outlived all her siblings and so many of her own generation, she manifests a deep and abiding appreciation for what counts – her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – and the memories of an extraordinary life.

The avalanche of memoirs from aristocrats on the other side of the water continues – the Duchess of Devonshire’s Wait for Me!, Lady Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go. . .now Viscount Norwich’s Trying to Please.  Of the three, he is the only one you could safely invite to your next dinner party – and be guaranteed that he would be a charming mixer:  witty, down-to-earth, open, without hauteur or attitude – a thoroughly good sort likely to stay and help clear things, if need be.

Norwich’s mother, Lady Diana Manners

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, was born in 1929 to a famous couple:  his father, Duff Cooper, had distinguished himself in World War I then gone on to a career in politics and diplomacy; his mother, Lady Diana Manners, brought up as daughter to the 8^th Duke of Rutland, was a much-celebrated beauty and actress.  It was an unlikely, but successful, pairing: a penniless war hero and an aristocratic deb; in pre-paparazzi days, their wedding such a crush of onlookers that “a body of mounted policemen had to be detailed to control the crowds outside,” Norwich writes.

Norwich as a child

His early years centered on a nanny whom he adored, John Julius was educated at London day schools (the first, called “Miss Betty’s” sounds like a house of ill repute), then dispatched to another school in Canada for safety’s sake during World War II, then back to England for Eton, Navy service, and Oxford (where Isaiah Berlin was his tutor), then into the Foreign Office.  He held posts in Belgrade, Beirut and Geneva before deciding the life just wasn’t for him.  He resigned in 1964 and became a writer of bestselling books, establishing himself as the English-speaking world’s authority on Byzantium and Venice.  Well-known for some thirty television documentaries on a wide range of subjects (The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, The Treasure Houses of Britain)  and for his four-year stint as host of the hugely successful radio panel game My Word, Norwich, at the age of eighty, cuts a dashing figure and is a quickly-recognised man-about-town.

And so, after a couple of dozen books, Norwich published his autobiography, Trying to Please in Britain in 2008.  Axios Press, based in Mount Jackson, VA, acquired the American rights and have recently issued a handsome edition here.

Norwich is a born storyteller with a narrative gift and very considerable charm.  It may just be that his own beloved nanny told him what Nancy Mitford’s told her before pushing her into a room full of people:  “Remember, you are the least important person in that room.”  Norwich never makes himself the center of the story:  other people figure larger in the landscape, whether his parents, his wife and children, or his friends.  He is clearly someone whose friendship others value highly and he returns their loyalty and dedication.

As the son of parents near the centre of things and as a man who has made his own eminent way in the worlds of diplomacy, media and the arts, Norwich knows a good deal about twentieth-century arts and cultural life, particularly in Britain and Italy.  It seems he’s been nearly everywhere and met everyone – Churchill, de Gaulle, Bill Paley, Stavros Niarchos, Laurence Olivier, and the usual suspects from the Royal Family, the Queen Mother and Her Majesty herself (but not Princess Margaret?  What a shame!)  His accounts of two visits to the Vatican – one with his mother to meet Pius XII, the other with the Duke of Norfolk to represent the Queen at the coronation of Paul VI – offer glimpses behind the scenes of Vatican protocol and British diplomatic pageantry.

The narrative of the audience with Pius XII details a formal, indeed theatrical, experience:

We were led through a whole series of splendid rooms, each of which seemed to be inhabited by people of a different century:  from a nineteenth-century one full of elderly gentlemen in frock coats we would pass directly into what appeared to be the main reception room at Elsinore, with men looking exactly like Hamlet in black doublet and hose and clinking swords; then into a room full of Swiss Guards in their red, blue and yellow Michelangelo uniforms.  All the time the tension seemed to mount:  the whole process was theatrical in the extreme. . .we entered into the Holy Presence. . .we made our reverences. . .There followed a long silence.  The conversation, we had been assured, would be in English, in which the Holy Father was naturally fluent; this proved, however, to be something of an exaggeration.  My mother and I had to make the going, the Pope reacting favorably or unfavorably as required:  the favorable reaction was “very fine, very fine,” the unfavorable “very difficult, very difficult.”

The audience with Paul VI reveals a different pontiff, to be sure:

The protocol was nowhere nearly as elaborate as it had been when my mother and I had our audience with Pius XII; still, it was impressive.  In I went, made my carefully rehearsed reverences and received a blessing—accompanied, to my surprise, by a small leather case.  The Pope explained.  He had already given the Duke a commemorative medal bearing his portrait struck in gold; he wished me to have a silver one, but unfortunately the silver ones were not yet ready.  Mine would be sent as soon as possible (it was) but meanwhile he would like me to have something to take with me now.  ”And so,” he said, “I give you this silver medal of my predecessor, Pope John.  And believe me, that’s so much better.” I could see that he meant it, and felt the tears come into my eyes.  They do so again as I write these words.

Norwich today

For all the people who figure in this memoir, and for all his self-effacing humor, Norwich makes the most lasting impression, especially when he writes of his family.  What he treasures most – even beyond the magnificent decaying pile of his beloved Venice (the salvation and preservation of which he gives himself to with gusto and characteristic dedication) is that family –  his wife, his children, his grandchildren.  But maybe most of all his mother; he writes of her death with dignity and poignant affection: 

You can’t imagine what it’s like,’ she said to me one day, ‘lying here staring at the same bit of wallpaper all day, with nothing to look forward to.’  The words haunted me; they still do.  On June 17, 1986, I went to see her in the evening as usual and found her in moderately good spirits.  At eight the next morning. . .she was dead. . .We buried her at Belvoir [family castle], next to my father.  I walk or drive past her house almost every day—never without a pang.

John Julius Cooper, 2d Viscount Norwich, is an elegant grandee of taste and refinement, a man of no pretense and good cheer, someone who has lived a rare and good life and has the grace to acknowledge it without vengeance or reprisal.  Trying to Please is splendid testimony to that life as well as good reading for a chilly autumn afternoon.

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What to say of whom so much has been said by some of the best Americans saying words about words today – George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Brian Evenson, others still – still harder to find a more descriptive description of reading Gary Lutz than a fragment from one of his own fragmented stories, one found in fact in this very collection which I have been carrying around with me for weeks,

. . . a heavyweight paperback I was not so much reading as working a different, less stable shape onto, putting leisurely violences into the turning of pages so that when I was through with a book it was a lopsided thing, something far atilt that could be pointed to, publicly, as an example of someone’s having stuck something out . . .

It’s a fragment from a sentence of epic length found in “My Final Best Feature,” excerpted in its entirety by John Madera on BIG OTHER.

Though this paperback reprint of I Looked Alive is not physically heavy but content-wise yes, and -rich like an expensive dessert at a fine restaurant, I could settle for that – my copy is pretty worn – but I won’t. Instead I will conduct a series of literary summersaults in which I will attempt to approximate the experience I’ve had reading this collection.

If you want to skip my blurb – which, it is what it is – skip ahead to page five. Anyway it’s done for me, me, and me. And we are usually looking out the window.

On 25 February 1980, the distinguished French literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes (b. 1915), walking home from a lunch party given by Francois Mitterand, soon to become President of the Fifth Republic, was struck by a laundry van outside the College de France, where he had taught for some time.  Although his injuries were minor and the doctors predicted a complete recovery, Barthes withered away, almost as if he had willed himself to death.  Perhaps he had.  His death on 25 March 1980 followed that of his eighty-four year old mother by less than three years.  They had lived together for more than sixty years.  Only those close to Barthes knew how deeply affected he had been by her passing.  Now, with the publication of Mourning Diary (published as Journal de Deuil last year in France), others will know, and share the dark privacy of his consuming grief.

The publication of this volume, and another, Carnets du Voyage en Chine (Notebooks of a Journey to China) shocked the Parisian literary crowd not just for the intimate moments and tastes disclosed (e.g., Barthes’ fondness for oral sex with men), not just because both texts are really fragments, certainly unfinished, but because neither was ever intended for publication.  Perhaps those who tend the flame of Barthes’ memory feared that his magisterium would be undermined or subverted if the public were to know too much about the great man (in the Chinese notebook he laments not having seen a single Chinese penis).  Has Barthes been betrayed by the revelations in both texts?  I think not.

The night after his mother’s death, 26 October 1977, Barthes began the habit of jotting down brief reflections or concern in pencil or ink, on sheets of typing paper, quartered like index cards.  Without fear, hesitation, restriction, or apprehension about future publication, Barthes recorded his most intimate and searching responses to death and life, ultimately providing an index of sorts to his writing.  He reflected on his own grief as well as the new solitude he experienced, while meditating on the larger mysteries of being and time, recording how he viewed his own mental state with disarming frankness (“Not even the desire to commit suicide,” he notes in one entry).

Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?

Images courtesy Michel Salzedo

In his daily jottings, Barthes attempts – ultimately, without success – to come to terms with this catastrophic loss which, of course, prefigures his own death.  Without the consolation of traditional religious faith – but with an occasional flickering of speculation about souls and the afterlife – Barthes carries on in Existentialist fashion, choosing to continue living in the flat they had shared for so many years, intermittently wracked by nightmare and crying jags, tortured by the question, “from now on, what meaning can my life have?”  In the process of the daily round – for Barthes this meant not only the little chores of ordinary life but also preparation for his extraordinary lectures at the College de France and writing three of his most important works – Camera Lucida, A Lover’s Discourse, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes – all the while charting the geography of solitude and cataloging excursions into the realm of paradoxical contentment for a grief-stricken man desperately craving anonymity.

The Barthes of Mourning Diary is an epic heroic figure, confronting and accepting his own mortality.  He emerges as a deeply private and sensitive man devoted to his mother.  Suffering, pain, and a certain fragility imprint the text. The writing is so fresh, so honest, so revealing, that at times the reader may feel that he should not be reading these notes – it is almost a violation of a cherished intimacy and, like the greatest of loves, something not meant to be known to any but the participants themselves.

Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion.
But all my life haven’t I been just that: moved?

Images courtesy Michel Salzedo

Farrar, Straus has produced an exceedingly handsome text to complement Richard Howard’s nuanced and masterful translation of Barthes’ notes.  Nathalie Leger established and annotated the text, no easy task to judge from the handwriting.  Eight pages of black and white photographs of Barthes, sometimes with his mother, personalize the experience of reading Mourning Diary; of greater importance are the careful reproductions of a number of the “cards” on which Barthes recorded these meditations:  the handwriting, sometimes an elegant cursive, sometimes a hasty scrawl desperately in need of a palaeographer, breaks the barrier between author and reader, generating a final irony:  Mourning Diary may be the strongest evidence to refute Barthes’ most influential notion about “the death of the author.”  The cards inscribed, translated, and stacked in the textual deck of this book are a royal flush that may well trump Barthes’ most cherished axiom.

In one of the first things he set down in Mourning Diary Barthes asked, “Who knows?  Maybe something valuable in these notes?”  Nothing more valuable than the clef to the roman that was this man’s life and work?

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Reviewing Michael Gottleib’s recent Memoir and Essay, a mordant chronicle of East Coast “language writing” through the eyes of one of its less academically celebrated foot-soldiers, my good friend Jordan Davis writes, “this book pretty much demolishes whatever romance might be left for the life of a poet without credential,” particularly in New York. Fortunately, no one told Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch that the dream is over. Their collaborative Ten Walks/Two Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse) bursts with the kind of urban detail best – or at least most readily – appreciated by underemployed aesthetes:

“Honking gesse made the morning lucid and tender. Dandelions hadn’t been there Tuesday. A West African curling dumbbells spoke to his daughter in the prettiest French. A jogger in a coolie hat barely moved forwards. I turned into the North Woods just as three gay Germans (two shaved bald) stepped out. An hour later I’d see them in the East 100s.”

Fitch currently teaches writing in Wyoming, but both authors come off as anything but credentialed at the time the book was composed. (A reference to George W. Bush’s first hundred days pegs one section as occurring circa April 2001). Rather, they’re “rootless homeboys,” in blurber Lynne Tillman’s apt phrase, rich enough in time and attention, if little else, to pursue the larger projects on which their book draws: Sixty Morning Walks, published online here and the pair’s transcribed Conversations Over Stolen Food. The “walks” begin and end at a Harlem-adjacent apartment (a few, from a downtown girlfriend’s), and distill an hour of wandering into sixty sentences of recollected observation. On occasion, a few sentences at a stretch will coalesce into anecdote:

“I passed two mutts really going at it: the owners talking politely as if someplace else. The top dog got pulled when a Parks Enforcement vehicle approached. Two officers stepped out. The bottom-dog’s owner apologized for removing its leash. I’m sorry, she said, I just thought with all this space. I’m sorry, I kept hearing, but I could only see the police truck. I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

More often, attention is atomized at the level of the sentence (“A drop of water fell in my mouth as I passed the store for kid geniuses. A resident’s recycling bin overflowed with green bottles. Hispanic contractors huddled in lobbies: except one woman washed windows in just a teal sweatshirt”), and many passages would be equally credible presented in another order, or traded for sections of other walks. Similarly, the fact that walks are actually Fitch’s “solo” work, while clear enough online, is noted nowhere in the printed version. It’s an act of generosity to allow the reader to imagine that Cotner had, or might as well have had, a hand in these sections, but also a way of downplaying the individual sensibility – a “subjectivity,” as they say in the textbooks – that organizes the writing.

The two jointly composed “talks” that round out the book are, if anything, more diffuse, as Fitch and Cotner tote a cheap Dictaphone through Central Park, and into the Whole Foods at Union Square. (Beyond its opportunities for illicit “discounts,” the choice of the latter location is a sly comment on the difficult-to-romanticize sites available to would-be bohemians in today’s rebuilt, over-franchised Manhattan.) In the park, dead ends and doublings-back amplify the aimlessness of the dialogue, which ranges over immediate phenomena (“Do you like how backs of benches catch a glow from streetlamps?”), roommate stories, and wooly summaries of Aristotle’s and Wittgenstein’s views of language. In an interview, the authors confirm that the tapes were carefully edited and condensed for publication, and claim surprise that anyone has taken them for verbatim transcripts. Even in this form, the results disrupt conventional notions of literary shapeliness, much as the partipant’s favored zones of Fredrick Olmstead’s magnum opus play wilderness against cultivation. (It’s no accident that they amble through “the Ramble.”)

Cotner and Fitch’s project has too many antecedents to list – the book alludes to Thoreau, James Schuyler, and Lyn Hejinian, among others – and focusing on its structure and strategy misses its moment-to-moment humor, the writing’s lightly torqued syntax (“Waves blowing northeast spiraled sometimes”), and the sweet-natured affect conveyed by both of its voices. There are exceptions: one of the book’s funniest riffs is Cotner’s recounting of his vulgar pantomime in response to a reckless SUV driver. Still, its relative sunniness separates Ten Walks/Two Talks from the more critically-minded or politically transformative tradition of flanerie that passes through Baudelaire, Situationism, and the “New Sentence” work of Ron Silliman, in which every glancing “take” also reads as a microcosm of broader social relations.

That isn’t to say that that the authors are oblivious to their privileged position as observers. Cultural difference, whether in the form of Malaysian newspapers or “a sophisticated old black woman” holding up a coffee line, registers frequently, with a census-taker’s frankness, underscoring the membership of the book’s white, male, reasonably well-educated “I” in American culture’s – but not New York’s – unmarked case. Early in their Union Square talk, Cotner suggests that asking about someone’s “heritage” (i.e., ethnicity) amounts to a kind of pick-up line, with a subtext Fitch glosses as “I am aware of you as a body.” If that’s correct, then Fitch and Cotner are indiscriminate flirts, libidinously “aware” of the city, and every body in it.

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Meghan McCain wants to be memorable. In her new memoir Dirty Sexy Politics, she complains about a Secret Service-issued pin she had to wear during the 2008 campaign to identify herself as John McCain’s daughter. “Forget the pin,” McCain writes: “Remember my face. Could you do that?”

For those who don’t remember Meghan McCain’s face or writing, she remains the second-most famous daughter from the 2008 Republican ticket. During the election, she ran a blog detailing her travels with her father’s campaign. The blog, called McCain Blogette, has disappeared from the internet, but McCain has grown relatively well-known as a writer on the subject of how the Republican Party might attract young voters.

Her appeal is clear, as with each column and Tweet she’s assiduously groomed a dual self. She’s, aside from her support of gay marriage, a fairly dutiful young Republican and Senator’s daughter, but she’s a rebel in her mind, simultaneously as a punk (the pin imbroglio, getting caught stealing Romney campaign signs) and as a GOP Marianne. “Don’t let me pick up this torch alone,” she exhorts the Republican Party.

The torch she holds stands in for merit-badge notions like freedom, inclusiveness, and technological awareness – it stands for making noises that would welcome young people who feel less like outsiders than iconoclasts – but what McCain is saying hardly matters as much as how it’s said. The 2008 election provides an apt backdrop for a series of poses, each of them flattering in a Facebook-photo sense. McCain knows which angles to work.

Here Meghan is at the White House, with a vaguely disinterested Jenna Bush! (“I was excited to be there, but they weren’t excited to have me.”) Here’s Meghan with her closest friends on the campaign – smile! Each vignette places McCain amidst drama, but never at fault: the man who catches her stealing Romney signs, for instance, is “super-dorky” and a “jerk.” She’s kicked off her father’s campaign, but only because the organizers can’t understand the energy she might bring, if properly used.

The political children who’ve sought the spotlight are few in number; most tend to seem shy and retiring once the camera lights fade. Certainly, Jenna Bush, who’s published a children’s book and appears on TV periodically, has refused to allow the world the access to her emotions that McCain, three years younger, freely grants. And the likes of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (mentioned, totemically, in the memoir) and Patti Reagan Davis would have been befuddled by McCain’s ability to instantly transmit her feelings, if not also the impulse to blog at all.

And Dirty Sexy Politics begins to feel like a blog one’s read too long: while clearly worried over, McCain’s persona grates on the reader at times. A lengthy passage where Meghan McCain weeps and curses when her parents won’t reveal Sen. McCain’s running mate was especially poorly advised. Palin’s identity is “wrongfully secret”; McCain is still so angry about the incident that peripheral figures on the morning of the Palin announcement earn invective. “I know I will later claim that Steve Schmidt was my least favorite person on the campaign, but I really do mean it about Mr. Burns.” Mr. Burns, a political advisor pseudonymously named after Homer Simpson’s evil boss, knows information “the candidate’s daughter and a campaign blogger” doesn’t.

This is where the garrulously open ethos of the social-network generation and the duties of the political child part ways. The Meghan McCains of the world are obligated less to seem perfect than to seem relatable, somehow (a point McCain, in her litany of outfit descriptions, seems to miss). In her attempts to bridge the campaign to the hyper-democratic blogosphere, McCain only highlights how many surreal entitlements come with being a Presidential candidate’s daughter. Many bloggers just like her document their fights with their fathers; few of those fights are about the father’s running mate. There’s a reason daughters like Chelsea Clinton never spoke up, and not because, as McCain tartly claims, they seem to “be waiting for someone to peel them a grape.” It’s because when McCain opens her keyboard, she proves that she’s doing just that.

McCain seems to think that blog fame and real-world repute are interchangeable: “I should be allowed in and asked to join the team,” she writes of the Republican Party’s power brokers. It’s not meant as an insult, though, to say that no one on that team is interested in Meghan McCain for her ideas. As the 2008 campaign moves ever more into memory – and as McCain’s hoped-for open, welcoming Republican party moves ever more into the realm of fantasy – one suspects she’ll devote more of her energies to cultivating a web following rather than carrying political torches. Best of luck to her as she tries to become memorable online, or at least a meme – she’ll be a part of the most democratic system on earth. 

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