Marguerite Young and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

This review-essay appeared in the Washington Post Book World in 1994. A friend recently asked online whether I had ever read Marguerite Young, so let me post this as a reply.

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Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 1198 pp. 2 vols, $30

Angel in the Forest
A Fair Tale of Two Utopias
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 331 pp. $13.95

Marguerite Young, Our Darling
Tributes and Essays
Edited by Miriam Fuchs
Dalkey Archive, 143 pp. $24.95

Inviting the Muses
Stories, Essays, Reviews
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 246 pp. $21.95

by Gregory Feeley

The reception of Marguerite Young's enormous Miss MacIntosh, My Darling since its publication in 1965 has followed a pattern established by earlier American modernist novels of great scale and ambition: an interesting and mixed reception with meager sales, followed by long years of relative neglect (and often silence from the author) while the novel retains the ardor of a small but loyal audience who urge its virtues, decry its neglect, publish essays, and eventually see the book returned to print. William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, and (to a degree) Cynthia Ozick's Trust have experienced similar fortunes, but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out: at three quarter of a million words, not only is it by far the longest, it is also the barest of incident, the most demanding of its readers' patience, and the slowest (to date) to win approval from critics or academia.

Withal, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has had its partisans, along with several paperback incarnations over the past three decades, and has now found a patron in the Dalkey Archive Press, that indefatigable champion of avant garde literature. Readers who missed the last incarnation of Young's novel (a two-volume trade paperback from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich back in the late seventies) can now acquire the text in a handsome format (the pages photo-reproduced from the original Scribner's edition), which moreover allows one to follow the page citations in the essays being produced by the small but dedicated Marguerite Young industry. In publishing three books by or about Young this year (with a collection of her early poems soon to follow), the Dalkey Archive has radically enlarged the available material on Young, whose magnum opus has until now had to be approached solely on its own solitary terms, like a steep spur rising from the sea.

Despite the real interest of Young's 1944 Angel in the Forest (a study of the two utopian communities that successively settled New Harmony, Indiana in the early nineteenth century), and the three-volume biography of Eugene Debs, upon which Young has labored for most of the past thirty years and which will reportedly appear next year, Young remains very much a one-book author, and no one who hates Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (as Peter Prescott notably hated it in a prominent Newsweek review) should expect to find something more to his liking among Young's smaller works. Angel in the Forest may deserve a place among the important books on American social history, but the festschrift Marguerite Young, Our Darling and the occasional collection Inviting the Muses are at most minor satellites to Young's single and massive novel, whose readers have rarely had any but the strongest opinions.

Eighteen years in the writing, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an intensely phantasmagorical work, dream-like, repetitive, resolute in declining to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Its very plot resists summary: Vera Cartwheel, a young or perhaps middle-aged woman, is riding a bus to Iowa in search for Miss MacIntosh, her beloved childhood nursemaid, who drowned herself when she was fourteen. Whether Vera doubts Miss MacIntosh's death (her body was never found) or is simply seeking to trace the dead woman's origins is never divulged: although virtually the entire novel takes place with Vera sitting on the near-empty bus, obsessively recalling Miss MacIntosh and her own childhood memories, we do not learn anything of her plans, nor what her adult life has been, nor what year (or decade) it is. All we have are her swirling memories, and these can be unreliable as well.

Vera's mother lives in a great mansion on the New England coast, where she dreams away the years in an opium haze, holding conversations with dead friends, historical figures, her chandelier, and her drug bottle. In addition to her mother and Miss MacIntosh, Vera's recollections grow steadily to encompass a large cast of grotesques: Mr. Spitzer, her mother's devoted but spurned lawyer, whose dead brother seems occasionally to exchange identities with him; Cousin Hannah, a world-traveller, balloonist, mountain-climber and suffragist who claimed never to have wanted a husband but proved, after her death, to have left behind forty locked trunks, each containing a different wedding gown; a graveyard seducer with a noose's scars on his neck; Esther Longtree, a cross-eyed waitress who murdered her baby and is now perpetually pregnant; and lots more.

This sounds like a narrative cornucopia, but the reader who imagines that these colorful figures will be brought to life in the manner, say, of those in Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All will be in for a shock. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is virtually bereft of dialogue and outward incident: the long paragraphs recount everything at the same shimmery remove, like objects glimpsed underwater, dissolving any narrative elements into a vast sea of prose.

"Mr. Spitzer, still in a mournful mood, for someone was always dying, had carried this alpenhorn embossed with mother-of-pearl, heavy as a tree branch, along the foggy beach when Cousin Hannah was no more, when doubtless she had climbed her last mountain, the hailstones like buring cinders dashing in her face, and he had blown a few wandering notes like some old ghost calling to his lost love as he had heard, above the ringing waves ringing like silver bells, the ringing, tolling of the silver sheep's bell which had once rung to the lost sheep, hearing also, as he did so, the cries of the grey loons in the grey fog and the bah, bahing of waves breaking upon this shore of stone and fog as thick as fleece streaking with the golden rays of the moonlight, waves coming to pasture like sheep with moony eyes beamed upon the waves of darkness. . . ." (529)

Even a few hundred thousand words of this goes a long way, and I found the novel almost unbearable when I recently tried to read it straight through. Setting oneself a pace (even a leisurely one, such as most of the summer) proved intolerable -- the book's remorselessness and utter lack of counterpoint drive one to frenzies of impatience -- while twenty years earlier, I had no difficulty dipping into it at random and reading so long as my interest held. (Peter Prescott, who justified his trashing of the book by proclaiming that he had labored over it for two days, here earns a modicum of sympathy: few books are less suited to a reviewer's schedule.) Although Young's advocates insist on the book's "fugal" nature and careful construction, Anne Tyler probably speaks for more readers when she recalls the pleasure of browsing its pages at odd moments, a practice she gives the protagonist of The Accidental Tourist.

Although the structure of the novel may be eccentric--Vera's bus ride lasts until page 948, and her sojourn in a (characteristically unnamed) Indiana town is almost devoid of incident until the book's closing pages--the novel is plainly something other than the inchoate mass that an unsympathetic perusal suggests. Early chapters were published in anthologies and magazines throughout the 1950s, and to compare them with the finished text is to see how radically Young reworked her prose during the long years of composition: a 1954 fragment from New World Writing, which seemed very much of a piece, ends up scattered and recast through various early chapters, with few sentences persisting unaltered. Whatever logic governs the novel's structure, it is the product of long and careful labor.

One problem facing readers of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is they are trained to read prose differently than Marguerite Young cares to be read. We prefer our symbols anchored by literal referents: the sea in Joyce may be the eternal thalassa, but it is also the Irish Sea, whose particulars Joyce knows well. For Young, however, the sea is everything: birth, death, eternity, mutability--she uses the word "oceanic" constantly, and "foam" and "tides" almost as much--and while we know that the sea here is the Atlantic Ocean, for the Cartwheels' seaside mansion is in New England, we don't know where in New England, and what few details Young lets drop convinces me that she doesn't, either. From Joyce to Nabokov (both in his novels and his essays) and Gaddis, we have learned to look for particularity in the elements of narrative; and the free-floating symbology of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling's strikes modern readers as overblown, just as the melodramatic acting style of the nineteenth century grates on twentieth-century audiences, who cannot but take their own era's style as a benchmark. It may take another generation before readers can look at this novel without finding its style of artifice a bewildering irritant.

Whether most readers will try, of course, is another question. Whatever its virtues, Young's massive novel is open to the objection that Leavis made about Clarissa: that the demand it makes on the reader's time is both proportionally and absolutely so immense as to be prohibitive. If one does not consider Ivy Compton-Burnett a major novelist one may concede that she is at least a very good one; but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is either a great novel or it is nothing.

The contributors to Marguerite Young, Our Darling are in no doubt on this question. Expanded from a 1989 special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, this volume is the work of true believers. In addition to a section on "Tributes and Recollections" and another of "Essays," the book offers a gratifyingly full chronology, which sometimes tells us more than its compilers may have intended. Most of the writers who have lauded Marguerite Young over the decades--William Goyen, Mark Van Doren, Anais Nin, Kurt Vonnegut, their words of praise quoted on each Dalkey dustjacket--prove to have been old friends, while many of the younger writers who contribute full essays turn out, in the tributes they have also written, to be longtime protegees. It would be unfair but unsurprising for the cynical reader to exclaim, "This isn't an oeuvre, it's a cult."

Although these pieces show Marguerite Young scholarship to be still in its early stages--its contributors defensive about their subject's exclusion from "the canon," and readier to advocate than to discuss--anyone who has read Miss MacIntosh, My Darling will enjoy the company. Miriam Fuchs argues interestingly for Young's use of "liquescence as form," while Susan Strehle proposes that the novel evokes a "women's time" in which teleology, the yoking of cause to effect, and linear progression are supplanted by "the time of female subjectivity." And Marguerite Young herself--still living in Greenwich village, where she moved from the Midwest in 1945--is evoked with clarity and affection by a surprising number of writers, including Stanley Kunitz, Anne Tyler, and Amy Clampitt.

Other critical issues remain unexamined. Many of the novel's mythopoeic elements--Mr. Spritzer's shared identity with a radically dissimilar brother, as well as Vera's mother's dreamflights through history and the eternally pregnant Esther Longtree--suggest affinities with Finnegans Wake that I would have happily seen explored. Young, however, firmly denies any influence by Joyce; and her respectful scholars leave the point alone. It may be that Marguerite Young criticism will only come into its own once the imposing figure of Ms. Young is no longer in evidence.

In the meantime, her monumental Debs biography--2400 pages, according to a recent interview--will appear next year from Alfred A. Knopf. Such a massive project, coming on the heels of a revival of Young's previous work, will doubtless attract much attention, and prompt attempts by reviewers to link the socialist's biography with the phantasmagorical cult novel and the utopian study before it. Even with the ground cleared by the Fuchs volume, they will have their hands full.

ADMIRAL but not POET

I have been busy sedtting up a trust account for the Estate of Thomas M. Disch, a seemingly straightforward business save for the many forms required ("Letters Testamentary" and the like). On the day I brought all the stuff together, the bank representative went through the software options to establish the account. There was a drop-down option for the field for my name -- all sorts of forms of address proved available, including "Admiral." (I almost plumped for "Admiral Feeley," but decided to be serious.)

However, later on we had to putting in information for the other trustee, who will not be handling the account on a day-to-day basis but whose name needs to be on it. Entering data, the bank rep asked me for Ben Downing's occupation. Ben teaches and edits, but he publishes poetry regularly, so I suggested (not entirely winsomely) that she put him down as "Poet."

Sorry,the drop-down menu didn't allow for that one.

After Silence by Jonathan Carroll

I came across this old review by accident, and found that I didn't remember it at all. It appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction some fifteen years ago.

JONATHAN CARROLL: LONG, MEDIUM, AND SHORT


After Silence by Jonathan Carroll (London: Macdonald, 1992; L14.99; 240 pages; New York: Doubleday, 1993; $21.00; 227 pages)

"Uh-Oh City," F&SF, June 1992

"The Lick of Time," in Monsters in Our Midst, edited by Robert
Bloch (New York: Tor, 1993, $20.95; 303 pages)


reviewed by Gregory Feeley


After Silence, Jonathan Carroll's sixth book-length narrative in six years, is remarkably of a piece with the earlier works: vividly and beautifully written, sketchily (if at all) integrated with the other four novels and novelette in the unnamed (and, one guesses, improvised) sequence, haphazardly constructed. As before, Carroll's virtues begin paying off at once -- his sharp observations and striking metaphors are evident from the first page -- while his weaknesses conceal themselves until late, as his structure leans vertiginously forward so that the reader is impelled into the story, beguiled by Carroll's ability to tell (or at least begin) a Tale into a confidence that the author shall bring his Tale safely to harbor that proves finally misplaced. Readers may gnash their teeth at his novel's conclusion (although they should, by now, know better than be surprised), but there is little doubt that they will reach it.

Max Fischer, a successful but rather unreflective cartoonist, finds his long-deferred desire to raise a family suddenly fulfilled when he meets Lily Aaron and her nine-year-old son Lincoln. At once in love, Max falls effortlessly into family life, and lives in contented bliss until the gradual accumulation of tiny inconsistencies in Lily's accounts of her past at last drives Max into an unwise investigation. Discovering an awful secret, he is able to maintain his happy life only by becoming complicit with it.

Like Carroll's other novels, After Silence offers an intensely-felt meditation upon the vulnerability of loved ones (here, as before with Carroll, dramatized in a hospital); like his earlier novels, it captures moments of tenderness toward children with aching clarity (Max, seeking to impress Lily and Lincoln on their first meeting, draws a magic-marker cartoon on the front of Lincoln's white teeshirt while the delighted boy wriggles "like a puppy getting its tummy scratched"). And also, with Carroll, we get his snobbishness, his love of celebrity and disdain for the common, the untalented, and the ordinary; his infatuation with exotic names ("Max" is exceptionally unfanciful for a Carroll protagonist, but the novel contains other characters, all special, whose parents named them Foof, Mabdean, Sullivan, Anwen, Elvis. It is only working-class people -- almost invariably portrayed by Carroll as unattractive and boorish -- who are given names like Mark Elsen and Ruth Burdette).

And like other Carroll novels, After Silence fragments like a flaming race car as it attempts to negotiate a final tight turn and crashes the fence. Max's discovery of Lily's secret, and his decision to make a separate peace with its particular horror -- to brick it up, like a monster in the basement, and return upstairs to resume his happy life -- is powerfully (if, in its extended confession scene, long-windedly) evoked. The jump forward of seven years, and Lincoln's unforeshadowed transformation from a happy ten-year-old to a sullen, hateful, and dangerous adolescent, is dramatized with wrenching poignancy. But this heartfelt and anguished novel's leap into the supernatural (it comes late and abruptly, on page 185) knocks its emotional center from the realm of indissoluble cause and effect into a slumgullion of Carrollian metaphysics that goes nowhere. The inevitability of consequence is asserted -- among the talk of guardian angels, time travelling, and two persons being one -- but it is not made real; and even a last-page attempt to punch back out of the supernatural (it apparently involves a suddenly unreliable narrator) is unavailing.

The problem with After Silence (and, to varying degrees, of the other five volumes of this inchoate sequence) is not simply a matter of plotting. Carroll's inability to cope with the novelistic business of keeping chronologies straight (he tells us that thirty-eight-year-old Max has a brother twelve years younger, then later gives that brother a marital history plausible only for a man of mature years) doesn't finally matter, any more than it matters that he cannot conceive of a human being who doesn't have a quirky and rewarding job, or a dog that isn't a purebred. What matters is Carroll's failure to achieve imaginative resolution: to create artistic closure for the dream he has conceived. Despite his recurring concern with the inseparability of heedless act from tragic consequence, Carroll cannot shape events into a fitting and logical whole, which surprise us with turns that seem afterward as right. Instead, he summons up an otherworldly (and plainly ex post facto) explanation of events as needed and then -- as here, as in Outside the Dog Museum and Bones of the Moon -- rings down the curtain in a shower of magical fireworks.

Carroll's inability to surmount this shortcoming (apparent since Bones of the Moon) has been evident in all his fiction, including short stories and novellas. "Uh-Oh City" (F&SF, June 1992) is a longer work than the volume Black Cocktail (Legend, 1990), and offers the same degree of tenuous connection with his novel sequence: the narrator's daughter, who appears only in a telephone call, is the former girlfriend (never actually seen) of Max Fischer in After Silence. The novella contains all of Carroll's carelessness with detail (the protagonist, a Melville scholar, misspells Moby-Dick; a closer study of his chronology than Carroll seems to have conducted makes sense only if he received his doctorate at twenty-one; the young woman whose suicide he helped provoke is apparently both a freshman and a graduate student) and seems, like much of Carroll's fiction, to have been begun before the author knew what he was about. Entire sub-plots languish neglected, while characters' motivations and range of abilities shift in accordance with plot requirements. Carroll's central image -- an overweight, middle-aged woman who is dying of cancer -- seems to have found its inspiration with the fat lady evoked in the closing pages of Franny and Zooey; but what Carroll has done with it . . . Actually, it's difficult to know what Carroll has done with it. No three scenes in the novella possess thematic or narrative coherence.

The novella -- it concerns a preternaturally efficient cleaning lady named Beenie who persists in turning up unwanted reminders from the protagonist's past -- starts out as a kind of domestic horror story, then swerves suddenly (the cleaning lady turns out to be God, or rather one of the thirty-six lamed wufniks who, in Carroll's version, constitute God) into an emotionally fraught tale of unwitting injury and attempted amends. As long as one is reading, the succession of firecracker revelations hold the promise of coming finally together; it is only when one looks at the work entire that it falls apart.

When Beenie presents the protagonist with the manuscript of a novel written by a student who had committed suicide years ago, the bewildered man quietly decides to send it to her parents. This unannounced action calls down a rebuke from the apparently omnipotent Beenie, who explains, "Things like that, you either throw away or you keep 'em. Never pass 'em on." A few hours later Beenie blithely contradicts this bit of philosophy when she produces a cache of love letters a student once wrote to the protagonist, which she promptly shows to his wife. Bewildered and angry (he knows that both manuscript and letters had long since been discarded), the hapless protagonist goes to confront Beenie -- who proves to be sitting up with the ghost of the student novelist; and the plot takes another lurch.

None of these disparate developments prove compatible with each other. (A small example: The protagonist's wife already knew of the love letters, but had been assured by her husband that they had all been destroyed, as in fact they had. Her distress upon being presented with a batch of them was because she could only conclude, not unreasonably, that her husband had in fact kept the letters. So why would Beenie summon these letters back into existence and show them to the poor woman, if its only effect would be to create a false impression? Carroll doesn't know; the next scene produces a new surprise, and the narrative drops the previous issue, never to return to it.) As with After Silence, everything changes in the last pages, and then again in the closing paragraphs. Approaching the conclusion to a story,
Carroll -- trapped like the man who has painted himself into a corner -- can create dramatic conflict only by successively reversing everything he has hitherto said. Save for the steadily mounting stakes (the stories' final revelations often end up featuring God or angels), there is no inner logic, no structure to these frantic reversals.

At 4000 words, "The Lick of Time" is too compact to tangle itself in its plot threads, although its references to other characters and milieux from Carroll's fiction do get it into minor trouble. (After an entire novel about the problems of the Sultan of Saru, Carroll refers in passing to the "Republic of Saru." If we encountered this in the work of a writer more skilled at drawing connections between texts, we would guess that Saru has had a revolution since the events of Outside the Dog Museum. With Carroll, however, we conclude merely that he is again forgetting himself.) The story's opening lines:

Before leaving her apartment, Erin turned on the new answering machine.

Several nights before, sitting down with the instructions and a glass of wine, she'd waded

through a long list of what-to-do's to make the expensive, high-tech-looking thing work.

is quintessentially Carroll, down to the haughty name, the expensive gimmickry, and the glass of wine. Its striking observations (listening to her first phone messages, Erin notes how callers "lost heart" when they realized that they were talking to a tape and not a human being), and the familiar mise-en-scene -- Erin had a "new job with the theatre group," and works with folks with names like Weber Gregston and Wyatt Leonard -- could almost come from an exceptionally skilled parodist. The protagonist, another articulate, sexually anxious yuppie who isn't very nice, develops an interesting psychological pathology as pressures mount about her (she ends up talking to her phone machine, leaving heartening messages and occasionally acting out responses she had hoped to hear from others), but the story springs a supernatural twist in the final page, and that's that.

Carroll's fluent style, his striking facility with metaphors, and the manifest seriousness of his concerns have struck a chord with many readers ("Uh-Oh City" was a Hugo nominee), but his sloppiness has escalated in recent years from a problem to an embarrassment. Carroll's narrowness of range and problems with narrative are not bound to length: neither short story, novella, nor novel has permitted him to marshall his energies into a coherent narrative, and the reader who looks past the colorful conceits (a "dog museum" that costs a billion dollars; the appearance of a giant stuffed animal in the shape of a childhood nightmare in "Uh-Oh City") will find fictions that are largely a shambles.

More prolific than in his early years, Carroll is notably less craftsmanlike, and has fallen into tics and self-indulgence even as he continues to coin phrases and sentences of startling beauty. A dozen years into a remarkable career, Carroll is wallowing -- apparently oblivious -- in a creative crisis that threatens to whelm it.

The Truman Show: Another Retelling of Hamlet

In an earlier post ("Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet," May 4, 2008), I described the experience of seeing Iron Man and realizing that Hollywood was again giving us, whether it (or its audience) realized it or not, another retelling of Hamlet. As the tale of a brilliant, troubled young man who, pursued by private demons, acts badly -- especially towards women -- and finds himself (rather being roundly censured by those around him) having everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head (could it have something to do with his intimidatingly impressive father? or maybe the seemingly benign figure who has now taken his place?), its affinities with Shakespeare's 1601 drama seem obvious enough, at least to me. Tony Stark ends up triumphant, rather than dead, but that particular Hollywood revision -- that the hero, a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning who quickly turns into a roguishly charming hero, shows his redemption by doing the the Right Thing, at the certain cost of all he values most, but ends up not having to pay the cost after all, and is shown at film's end victorious and universally adored -- is so fundamental as to apply even to, say, Cars.

A few days ago I showed the first forty minutes of The Truman Show to my twelfth graders, who had just finished reading Hamlet. They picked up on the parallels immediately: The Truman Show tells the story of a charismatic young man of seemingly limitless promise, admired by everyone in his tiny clockwork community, who has recently fallen prey to a seemingly unaccountable malaise. Everybody wants him to feel better, and assures him that this will happen if only he stops asking questions about things. His mother wants him to stop worrying and enjoy life; so does the best friend who is choreographed into his path at every turn. The love of a fair woman is dangled before him, inducement enough, people seem to hope, for him to forgo his wish to be elsewhere. But there is some mystery involving his beloved father, who is dead -- or is he? A ghostly appearance one evening . . . .

I mean, that sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? The Truman Show has two Ophelia figures -- one good, one bad -- and it conflates Horatio with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into one composite figure. But there is a true father (marginalized, indeed only problematically alive), and a would-be, seemingly benevolent father figure who controls all, and who wishes to control Truman as well. It ends in sappy triumph, rather than profound tragedy, but what recent movie doesn't? (Well, Sweeney Todd -- whose protagonist offers us another avatar of Hamlet -- doesn't, but it had its origins far from Hollywood.)

One of my students asked me whether The Truman Show had been intended as a modern-day riff on Hamlet. I told her that so far as I was aware, nobody had noticed the similarities but me. A few days later I checked online, and indeed, there are no references at all to such a parallel. They certainly seem evident to me.

Robinson, Le Guin, Clute, Egan

I came across the file of this science fiction review column, written in April 2002 for the Washington Post Book World. It considers The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, Appleseed by John Clute, and Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. I remember that it had been cut on its original appearance, with the final book omitted.

Looking it over, I think I managed to say some worthwhile things, though I would now put more emphasis on the virtues of Schild's Ladder (whose neat parts still linger in memory). Anyway, here it is:


April 2002 Science Fiction

New forms of representing the new are not common under the sun, and science fiction (always a more conservative genre than it admits to being) almost never makes a radical break with its past traditions. "No science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand alone," as one of the authors reviewed this month observes in an afterword, explaining the pressure of history that weighs on every attempt to sketch the future. The four books before us each embody a familiar mode of twentieth-century SF -- alternate history, "future history," space opera, and the scientist's creation gone berserk -- and its authors are in their fifties, seventies, sixties, and forties respectively, which neglects the younger end of the spectrum but does offer a broad-range look at a genre that boomed with the Boomers (and is now being shouldered aside by various flavors of Fantasy).

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (Bantam, 658 pp., $25.95) begins in the Islamic year 783, 1405 by the Christian calendar, with a scouting party of the Mongol conqueror Temur crossing west through the Moravian Gate to discover a land decimated by plague. Forbidden to rejoin the Golden Horde for fear of contamination, the party disperses and Bold, an aging campaigner, flees through a desolate landscape that makes clear that the population of Europe has been almost wholly wiped out.

The ten sections of Robinson's very long novel move from that year to the late twenty-first century of a world radically different from our own. Europe is slowly resettled by Muslims, who also colonize Africa and much of central Asia; China eventually conquers Japan and the Incas, while the Hodenosaunee League in North America loses the east and west coasts to encroaching foreigners but holds onto the interior. The developments of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution take place in different periods, under very different conditions.

Alternate history is by now an established commercial publishing category, with a ready audience for books that describe the new course history takes after some implausible event -- hey, what if Robert E. Lee were supplied with Kalashnikovs by South African time-travellers, or a shower of giant meteorites destroyed the rivals to the British Empire, and the Raj prospers into the twenty-first century? -- opens up new military opportunities. Alternate history's appeal to politically truculent readers who seek fictitious validations of their personal ideologies, and to "military history" buffs who enjoy reading exotic variants of their favorite wars, is plain enough, and has given the sub-genre an artistic vitality that falls somewhere those of a role-playing game and a chat-room screed.

Robinson's novel is insistently unlike this, although its opening sections offer vivid tours of the transformed world that seem (at first) fairly conventional. But its sections are unified by an unusual device: the main characters of each are reincarnations of the same souls, whose continuity is easy to trace because their names over the centuries begin with the same letter. That soul who is Kyu in the first story (and Kokila, Katima, and so on thereafter) is combative, imprudent, and prone to getting himself (or herself) killed; while Bold (Bihari, Bistami . . . ) is more comfortable in the world, meliorist and optimistic.

The reader immediately notices that the hierarchical and essentialist metaphysics of the reincarnation theme is profoundly at odds with the rest of the novel, which presents a world that is secular, contingent, uncentered, and driven by economic realities. The system of coding souls by the initial letters of their mortal selves' names is even more peculiar; Robinson can't actually "mean it"; doing so would certainly consistute a Folly.

And indeed, parts of the novel contradict or undermine other parts, which is surely a fault if you believe that alternate history (or fiction generally) should offer a vision of adamantine seamlessness and "inner" consistency. Robinson does not, and his novel's willingness to dissolve boundaries it has earlier set up, or step outside its confines and comment on itself, shows it to be indeed a Folly, which Robinson has come to praise.

At one point relatively late in the novel, two characters are discussing whether history is cyclic or linear. The cyclic model invariably adopts the seasons of the year as metaphor -- "But what if they are nothing at all alike," asks a character, "what if history meanders like a river forever?" The image of history as a river -- specifically of unpredictable change manifesting as rising waters, and problematic revolutionary energies erupting in the breaking of a dam -- appears throughout Robinson's work, and perhaps someone will write a thesis on hydrology as synecdoche in the political imagination of Kim Stanley Robinson.

If so, they had better retain an appreciation of the droll. Robinson's novel is essentially comic, for all that it dramatizes many appalling events, and Robinson's willingness to peep around the side of his puppet theater and wink at the audience (there are half-hidden quotes of Karl Marx, John Fowles, and others, plus a faintly deprecating discussion of the "device" of giving a soul's successive incarnations names that begin with the same letter) stands as an implicit but thorough rebuke to the kind of war-gaming determinism that most "alternate histories" embody. The Years of Rice and Salt is Robinson's richest, most subtle and moving novel, a meditation on history and humanism that abjures easy answers and ends up (unlike most alternate histories) knowing more than in tells.


Six of the eight stories collected in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Birthday of the World (HarperCollins, 368 pp., $24.95) belong to her long sequence concerning the interstellar Ekumen, while one might as well be, and the last -- the longest, a tale of a generation ship's centuries-long journey which the ground rules of her future history preclude -- is antiphonal. Written over the past eight years (about the same period as last year's Tales of Earthsea), the stories are set on seven different worlds, but Le Guin doesn't differentiate between them in terms of gravity, atmospheric composition, axial tilt, or any other particular: they are mostly indistinguishable from Earth. More than ever before, her particulars are the stories' people.

The first story, "Coming of Age in Karhide," is a first-person account of a young Gethenian (a hermaphroditic native of the world Le Guin dramatized in The Left Hand of Darkness) growing into puberty in a clannish community where sexuality is not an issue except for a few days a month, when sex is an imperative and any non-relative a potential partner. The story proceeds smoothly -- abjuring all the conflicts and resolutions of conventional plot dynamic -- from ignorance to experience, and the protagonist's account of the sensations and misgivings s/he experiences is at once recognizable and strikingly unfamiliar. The reader's inability to draw a line where the one becomes the other -- that is, the story's ability to confound any reader's attempt to parse it -- is vivid evidence of its imaginative power.

Le Guin at her best is always undermining the borderline between categories, which is good because she has something of a weakness for them. Universality vs. individual experience, nubby particularity vs. general truths, are forever attracting Le Guin, who yearns to reconcile such oppositions in what a character calls "the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality" but finally pulls back, knowing better. This tension often threatens to pull her stories apart, but seems actually (at least in her best work) to hold it together.

A critic once spoke of Orson Scott Card's stories as coming from either "Nice Orson" or "Nasty Orson," and one can venture (very provisionally) to see in Le Guin's work the hand of a Good Ursula and a Bad Ursula, the improving moral instructor and the scapegrace artist who capers outside the other's judiciously ruled lines. A model that attempts to account for a writer's resistance to modeling is a pretty shaky thing, and the most immediate problem with this one is the readiness of Good Ursula and Bad Ursula to switch roles when you're not looking. This readiness is nowhere more evident than in Le Guin's long interest in patterns of sexual politics, a subject (increasingly central since her 1991 volume Searoad) which has driven her at times to the precincts of the counsel of despair.

Le Guin's invocations of sexual violence, the destructive powers of religious orthodoxy (almost always masculine in nature), and men's susceptibility to militarism lead her time and again to the verge of concluding that there is something irredeemably destructive in the male psyche. Every story that touches this point, however, immediately reaches offstage to produce an example of a good male, an exception to what it seemed otherwise ready to rule. This is Good Ursula, recoiling from dogma and being fair. What is fascinating (I do not mean this sarcastically) is to see how Bad Ursula immediately undercuts this, showing -- with real subtlety and rhetorical power -- how this good male really isn't very different from the rest after all. Good Ursula may scruple at making such judgments, and Bad Ursula not hesitate or care, but there is no question which figure is more imaginatively alive.

If "Coming of Age in Karhide" is purely wonderful, and the next story, "The Matter of Seggri," scarcely less so, the rest seem (with the exception of the penultimate, title story) to march steadily downward in quality, which is troubling because Le Guin seems to have arranged them in something close to their order of composition. "Paradises Lost," the generation ship novella, is full of sharp observations and lovely moments, but gives us a devious religious cult that is too plainly tailored to merit the reader's scorn for it to possess any imaginative reality. The natural world with its discomforts and dangers is proven superior to an artificial environment; uncertainty and openness superior to serene dogma, especially when it's sneaky. Too tidily categorical, the story undermines only its own straw men. Bad Ursula does better with real targets.


The inhabited galaxy of John Clute's Appleseed (Tor, 335 pp., $25.95) seethes: with people zipping through vast artificial structures, starships popping through wormholes, tractor beams and laser weapons and other sci-fi hardware flashing across space. But mostly it seethes with the movement of data, AIs (here called Made Minds) as ubiquitous as the electronic devices in the kitchens, home offices, and living rooms of Clute's twenty-first century readers. The protagonist's ship is named Tile Dance and the tiles suggest both the computer chips of our own era, the tiny colored tiles that constitute figurative wall designs (the Portugese art of azulejaria is repeatedly cited), and any flat surface -- a screen, a sheet -- that can offer a vista onto distant realms. On every page, they dance.

Radically transformed environments are inhospitable to description via familiar language, and Clute's first novel in twenty-five years employs a prose style that fuses neologisms, old-fashioned slang, and various arcane terminologies into a dense kinetic impasto ("For several Heartbeats, within Klavier, where a trillion trillion axons had begun to find each other again across the commissural link forged by Tile Dance, the wound of Vipassana's passage through muscle and tendon of the heartwood burned like a white-hot poker caught between teeth. A trillion tongues burned to ash"). Readers used to a diction that holds to a high (or low) style, or who balk at mixed metaphors, may have trouble getting a grip.

Clute's tale of the complications that envelope the captain of the Tile Dance when he accepts a job transporting cargo to an unfamiliar planet is fast-moving, crunchy in its gnashing complexities, and suitably cosmic in implication; a sequel may be needed. A turbo-charged space opera that shows considerable fondness for its earnest predecessors (it was Clute who made the remark about the influence of a century of SF), Appleseed has seemingly little in common with The Birthday of the World. Yet each shows a painful awareness of the dichotomies between embodiment and abstraction, between ravening male and abiding female; each expresses -- in very different ways -- a yearning to locate a state of true center, where incompatibilities can be balanced if not reconciled, and authenticity, a dream that haunts both books, can body forth distinct from the imitative and the unreal.


Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder (Eos, 342 pp., $25.95) deploys a good deal of ingenuity and mathematics to tell his story of far-future scientists who create a novel vacuum state that expands uncontrollably, eventually filling millions of cubic light years and swallowing thousands of worlds. Unfailingly imaginative and intelligently written, it does everything more than ably -- Egan surmounts many problems he sets up for himself, such as maintaining interest in superhumans who can flee even such a cosmic calamity without loss of life -- and offers plausible renditions of a range of striking notions, such as the Qusp, a "quantum singleton processor" installed within the human brain that allows people to carry out cognitive operations without producing entangled systems, thus allowing posthumans to become what Homo sapiens had merely imagined themselves to be: creatures of choice, "capable of doing one thing and not another."

A conceit this piquant should give rise to some deeply strange protagonists, but Egan's characters seem surprisingly drab, despite the increasingly bizarre transformations they undergo. Egan creates an interesting twist on the Frankenstein theme by giving us a protagonist who finds the expanding menace the most refreshing thing to happen to mankind in millennia, but the reasonableness with which he (and his opponents) explain their convictions becomes slightly numbing. More interesting for its individual moments than for the (surprisingly conventional) form of its tale, Schild's Ladder fails to startle the reader in the way that Egan's best work does. When Egan is ready to tell a story that confronts the implications of its strangest elements, he will produce something genuinely uncanny.

Right about the Anthrax

This week's news has brought to mind my story "Giliad," written during the fall of 2001 and dealing with the events of that time. I opened up the file and searched on "anthrax," to find this:

The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings' news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation's capital, with senators' offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: the United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.

"They say it's Saddam." Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores' surprising sophistication to declarations by "fellows" at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.

"Well, it certainly isn't the Taliban." The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world's superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda's penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation's nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless freefall.

And, a few pages later:

By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the American "bioweapons community," which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. "Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the 'Ames strain,'" he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.

It seems as though my character was right.

Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet

Emily's choir group is off touring this weekend, so we took Nathaniel (who felt neglected) out to see Iron Man. Felt like a lemming doing so, being stampeded right in the direction that most lemmings go.

The film is what (I hope you) would expect; for $100 million plus, you get a polished script with some funny and witty lines, and striking special effects. It is also emotionally dishonest in the way that virtually all big-budget Hollywood films are: it trucks essentially in one theme, Redemption, which is achieved at no real cost. The protagonist was a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning, and now he's a roguishly charming hero, but exactly what has he renounced, and with what effort? He has, in the climax, done the Right Thing, at certain cost of his life, but he didn't die, the Right Thing did exactly what it was supposed to, and now he's universally adored.

Look at just about any contemporary Hollywood epic (at least one with a male protagonist) and you get the same thing. Which is to say that the film is, on one level, basically Cars.

And on another level it's basically a bargain-counter Hamlet. Has anyone noticed how many Hollywood movies are about a charismatic, brilliant, but troubled young man who acts badly and, instead of being roundly censured, has everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head? And a dead father figure, not necessarily murdered by the false father who stands in his way, but usually something like that? And bad behavior toward women, which the film wants us to forgive readily?

I don't get to watch a lot of movies, but I see this quite often when I do. Did anyone else notice that The Truman Show is basically Hamlet?