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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview

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With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them. —Sophia Stewart, editor October Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F] What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico. Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF] What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans  the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage. Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F] What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway. Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF] What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel. Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F] What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy. Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F] What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles. Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF] What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style. Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F] What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything. Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS The Great When by Alan Moore [F] What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it. Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF] What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians. Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF] What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy. Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F] What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English. Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F] What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family. Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF] What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences. Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F] What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers. Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF] What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence. Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF] What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy, Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F] What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel. Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF] What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion. Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F] What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut. Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF] What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath. Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F] What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language. Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF] What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare. Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF] What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet. Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF] What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way. Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF] What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening. Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF] What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description. Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF] What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager. Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F] What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy. Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF] What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem). Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F] What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village. Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF] What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee. Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF] What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance. Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF] What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years? Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB [millions_email] The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF] What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al. Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS Salvage by Dionne Brand  What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return. Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS Masquerade by Mike Fu [F] What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend. Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS November The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F] What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler. Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F] What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982. Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF] What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more. Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F] What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan. Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF] What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu. Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF] What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture. Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F] What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy. Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F] What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues. Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F] What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss. Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F] What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem. Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF] What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century. Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time. Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF] What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic. Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF] What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music. Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF] What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners. Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F] What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery. Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF] What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life. Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F] What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide. Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF] What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF Cher by Cher [NF] What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it. Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F] What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself. Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction.  —DF American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF] What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my! Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF] What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control. Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS December Rental House by Weike Wang [F] What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship. Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem. Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F] What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop. Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]  What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis. Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F] What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media. Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F] What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse. Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF] What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt. Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF] What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S. Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F] What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle. Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F] What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel. Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F] What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories. Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F] What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them. Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com. [millions_email]

Margaret Thatcher, Humanist Icon: Reflections on Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia

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I.The year is young yet, but I'd like to direct your attention to what will no doubt be recognized as one of the finest short stories published in it. It is called "Walter Benjamin," and it appears in the Australian journalist Clive James' experimental omnibus, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. I use the term "experimental" advisedly; like the revelatory works of W.G. Sebald, Cultural Amnesia weaves history, fiction, and memoir so tightly together that it may be hard for the casual reader to tell the imaginary from the real... particularly as Cultural Amnesia purports to be a work of criticism. Compound this postmodern pliability with a classic unreliable narrator - James himself - and vertigo quickly sets in.So how does an artist hold together such an ambitious edifice? "Style," James tells us, in one of his not infrequent moments of insight. And if some of James' critical pronouncements lead us to suspect him of a tin ear, his writing confirms that he has learned a great deal from Proust, from Gibbon, from Waugh. Cultural Amnesia, which at 850 pages looks like intellectual heavy lifting, turns out to be a lively read: clear, colloquial, provocative, and often funny. James the stylist prizes clean rhythms, practical diction, an air of erudition, and above all the art of aphorism. We discover early on that he is a fine coiner of apercus, and if fatigue sets in halfway through the book, we finish with exhausted admiration: the man is a mint, a machine churning out sheet after epigrammatic sheet.Unfortunately, in literature, unlike science, elegance is no indicator of truth, and it's not always clear whether James' clever turns of phrase are backed by any standard other than authorial fiat. To put it another way (paraphrasing Virginia Woolf), Clive James seems willing to throw a few truths on the fire in order to make an essay blaze. Of Rilke, for example, he writes, "There is a dangerous moment when, in the [Duino] elegies, 'the tear trees, the fields of flowering sadness' start sounding like fine shades of meaning, instead of forced exercises in sentimentality." James' British resistance to even the mildly visionary does lend this assessment a bumptious snap, crackle, and pop. But in straining for a phrase to parallel "fine shades of meaning," the critic does violence to the poet he professes to admire. Whatever they are, the Elegies are less like "forced exercises" than anything else in the Rilke canon... possibly in 20th Century poetry. And this slip recursively undermines one of James' earlier aphorisms, decrying "ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist." (Because what else is James doing with Rilke here? (And do we really venerate artists for their "smarts?"))We can forestall the dizzying cascade of parentheses that might ensue by reminding ourselves that Cultural Amnesia is, among many other things, a character study. Its subject: one Clive James. For the duration of our reading, we are in the presence of a voice no more self-aware than that of Nabokov's Kinbote. As with Pale Fire, we get to what is worthwhile not by nodding along with the narrator but by reading through him, by teasing out the contradictions he's straining to conceal. And because our narrator's subjects are seldom so small as a line of Rilke - because he rarely stoops to close reading - the potential rewards, are enormous.Really, despite some introductory fulminations against "ideology" (a neat lift from the Marxism it purports to abhor), Cultural Amnesia aims at a kind of unified field theory of 20th Century history and culture. In alphabetized essays running from Anna Akhmatova through Dick Cavett all the way to Stefan Zweig, James returns again and again to the same questions: How did artists (not to say works of art) respond to the atrocities of Nazism and Communism? How should we value works of art, and why, and which ones? II.These are, as James suggests, humanist questions, and if the answers he arrives at don't quite meet that standard, there's much to admire in the attempt. Over and above the sheer pleasure of James' style stands his passionate moral engagement with history. He assays his new humanism on behalf of the millions and millions of victims of totalitarian movements. Like McDuff, he feels these losses as a man.Indeed, writing about the suicide of Viennese polymath Egon Friedell, as storm troopers come "marching down the street," James sounds almost envious that he was born too late to have been there alongside Friedell, to prove his own mettle. Our current pieties and abstractions about the war in Iraq or the genocide in Darfur can sound hollow in comparison to James' moral outrage; there is much to learn from the way he takes massacres personally, and the critic owes it to him to take seriously the possibility that Stalin's gulags might be a "central product" of socialism, rather than an aberration. (There was a time when Jean-Paul Sartre did not take that possibility seriously, and if James' renunciation of everything Sartre wrote requires some willful misreading, at least it stands for something. James and Sartre have this in common: the belief that critical positions should never be lightly held.)It bears saying, too, that we are lucky Clive James is on our side. Passion is crucial to thought - it's what makes thought matter - but it can also cloud judgment, and too frequently in Cultural Amnesia James' zeal for laissez-faire liberalism tips over into a ratification of corporate capitalism or a crotchety disdain for "economic determinism [and] dogmatic egalitarianism." In the Introduction, he writes,"Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough [...] but their elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million."Even as he ignores Rwanda and Darfur (syntactically blaming the bright young things for even bringing them up), James seems implicitly to dismiss the liberal, democratic catastrophe in Iraq by saying, in effect, "well, things could be worse." Such Panglossian sophistry, pronounced throughout the book, is a blot on the good name of humanism.Nor does James quite follow through on his pluralist aspirations, which are the best and most deeply held part of his own ideology. He can imagine Duke Ellington jamming for Igor Stravinsky, but cannot hear the "we vs. they" contradictions in his assessment of leftist academics:"The Procrustean enemies of our provokingly multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our own airlines into towers of commerce. What they hate is the bewildering complexity of civilized life."To align the "witch doctors" of Cultural Studies with Al Qaeda is to fail to understand either, and this failure is not just intellectual, it is moral.In more supple hands, the conjoinment of conscience and illiberalism in James' essays - the way even his "descriptive" certainties shade toward systems of intolerance and control - might help illuminate the vexing ideological blind spots James exposes in subjects like Sartre. A fuller humanism, that is, might explore the ethical tensions of being human. But James, despite having his own person as good evidence to the contrary, conceives of human beings as unitary creatures, either cowardly or heroic. And, with sometimes disastrous results for his criticism, he resists the idea that generally lousy people can make genuinely great art.III.Given James' stern opposition to critical theory, it is both ironic and heartening to hear him decry the commodification of culture. In years past, an essayist's insistence on learning as its own virtue might have suggested a doctrine of art for art's sake. James, however, seems to view an artist's works as an accessory to his or her life. Beneath a veneer of newfangled catholicism, he is that most old-fashioned of creatures - a biographical critic. Reading carefully through his renunciations of ideology, it becomes possible to discern James' own. He does not believe that an artist with socialist sympathies can be as great as an artist who made do without them... or that a book colored by an objectionable ideology may also be a great one."Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the author of that amazing phantasmagoria Voyage au bout de la nuit, had also written Bagatelles pour un massacre, a breviary for racialist fanatics," he writes, blithely ignoring the incipient racism in the former. Why can't he see Journey to the End of the Night for what it is? Would remembering Celine's jaundiced account of the "primitives" in the novel's African section make Journey less of a book? Or does the dialogic form of the novel allow us to situate Celine's fictional alter-ego in a fully articulated ethical world, in which we can evaluate and possibly understand his misanthropy? Answering these questions would require a wholesale reexamination of James' precepts about art... and might even force him to borrow a trick or two from Marxist literary theory, or - horrors! - from deconstruction. But James, blithely assured that academic critics "have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement," can't entertain the notion that moral and ideological ambiguity might enrich, rather than reduce, a text.Of course, evaluating a genius mainly in light of his stated views on totalitarianism can itself become a reductio ad absurdum. Here, for example, is James' version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "Wittgenstein had thus constructed an instrument for discussing the totalitarian mentality, but he never used it. [...] There is evidence, however, that when he finally saw the photographs of the hideous aftermath in the concentration camps he forgot his famous rule about being silent on issues of which one cannot speak, and broke down in tears."Aside from being a vulgar misapprehension of Wittgenstein's proposition about the limits of language (or, if James had the nerve, a gestural opening into Wittgenstein's later philosophical investigations), this moment of voyeurism is spectacularly beside the point, reducing Wittgenstein and the Holocaust to mere credentialing mechanisms for one another. James presupposes that a virtuous human being surprised by the evidence of totalitarian slaughter could be anything other than grief-stricken. (In James account, Sartre would be one of those human beings. Here bad historiography is the accessory to bad criticism, falsifying the way Stalin's propaganda machine worked... which is not to excuse Sartre, who should have known better.) Anyway, we end up learning more about Clive James than about Ludwig Wittgenstein.Even those artists lucky enough to have died before the rise of totalitarianism are not spared the indignity of becoming Rorschach tests for James' various preoccupations. Gibbon gets taken to task for his prose (!) and Proust gets praised for all the wrong reasons. To hear James tell it, Proust's virtue is his essayistic "wisdom"; In Search of Lost Time has "no structure to speak of." This is heroically contrarian, but also dead wrong, and points to the blessing and curse of Cultural Amnesia. Unless we are inspired to remember the works of art James is nobly attempting to rescue, we'll be stuck having to take his word for it.Proust's "wisdom" isn't contained in his discursive speculations, the critical essays (sometimes enchantingly specious) indebted to Ruskin and Bergson. The Search's essayistic passages are aesthetic movements, not entries in a philosophical rolodex (a critic who characterizes Wittgenstein as primarily a poet should understand this.) It is precisely the structure of In Search of Lost Time, mapped in miniature by the "Combray" section, that embodies Proust's species of wisdom. James, not surprisingly, sees Proust's book as a mirror of his own - "an imaginative encyclopedia" - and misses the ironic reversals, the ultimate recognition toward which Proust's grand structure tends.But in James' own search, as in Proust's, the narrator's most dubious conclusions may serve to highlight deeper truths of psychology. The truth about Clive James is that he can't entertain the idea that his triumphalist brand of capitalist liberalism might have its own flaws to be guarded against, its own totalizing tendencies, its own rolls of the dead. James is wonderful on artists whose lives and work are ideologically in harmony with each other and with him, but is much less tolerant than his bete noire Georg Lukacs of those whose ideas challenge a laissez-faire global political order. James frequently and rightly affirms that a right to dissent saves liberal democracy from becoming a totalizing ideology, but can't conceal his resentment of the ungrateful few who exercise that right. And in the absence of Proust's structural wisdom - in the absence of a Recognition scene, in which the narrator belatedly discovers his own imperfect apprehension of things - Cultural Amnesia trembles with unresolved tensions, threatening to bring down even the heroes James has enlisted on behalf of his cause.IV.To borrow from his sketch of Egon Friedell, James "comes on like an actor and a thinker both." And sometimes the point of his performance seems to be to indemnify the capitalist West against any notion of progress. This leads him to the two tendencies that compromise, perhaps fatally, several of his essays.The first tendency is to distort the legacies of the cultural figures he admires (those who fit comfortably within the current version of centrist, bourgeois tradition) through misplaced emphasis. In James' ode to Louis Armstrong, Armstrong's single greatest achievement appears to be that he admired Bix Beiderbecke. Margaret Thatcher, we are told, posed "a crisis for Britain's ideological feminists, who could no longer maintain that there was a glass ceiling." Thomas Mann? "A solid paterfamilias." One does not doubt that Mann confined his homosexual feelings to his fantasy life, that Thatcher vexed feminists, and that Armstrong approved of white musicians. But surely the collective achievements of this triumvirate amount to more than allowing straight white heirarchs to say, "Look, boys, he's one of us!"Nor does James does reserve distortions for his fellow humanists. If he mischaracterizes artists who worked to shape the center, he fictionalizes those on the left.A tortured eulogy for Edward Said dissolves into an orgy of bad faith, as our narrator tells himself that faint praise and outright damnation add up to an ingenuous farewell."There is no call to doubt [Said's] integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards Western civilization can bestow. What can be doubted is his accuracy. [...] It is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who [...] found Orientalism a wrong-headed book. According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight: a patronizing idea, common to the Western left. Though most of Said's Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said's written work throughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said's role as a practical diplomat."This tangle of innuendo belies James' insistence elsewhere that transparency of prose and transparency of meaning are synonymous. Every possible charge against Said is given space on the page, even as James conceals his endorsement. The rhetorical coup de grace comes when James hides behind "some Arab thinkers." These nameless Arab thinkers' sole contribution to 20th Century culture seems to be that they make it easier for Clive James to write off a subaltern whose politics he finds threatening; in the rest of the book, James evinces no interest in Middle Eastern culture.We are further informed, in the space of a paragraph, that "the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical"; that "no Orientalist had ever been more damagingly superficial than" Edward Said (again, according to non-Western scholars); that "Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything it possessed" (said Naguib Mahfouz - and he won the Nobel Prize, so who can doubt him). James is nothing if not a marvel of compression:"Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world. Very few of Said's admirers in the West could begin to contemplate the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse. I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short this kind of soldier."We are witnessing here the birth of a new rhetorical mode: character assassination by friendly fire. Maybe James was right to suggest that Said should have stuck to playing piano.James is even worse on Sartre, whom he hates above all others. His inability to give Sartre a fair reading is a shame, as Sartre, unlike Said, might actually have been convicted of the most of the charges against him. To wit: "When Sartre broke with the Communists, he retained respect for their putatively benevolent social intentions, and was ready to say something exculpatory even if what he was exculpating was the Gulag network, whose existence, after he finally ceased to deny it, he never condemned as a central product of a totalitarian system, but only regretted as an incidental blemish."But as excoriation curdles into invective, James sinks so low as to suggest that Sartre's "physical ugliness" shaped his cultural positions, that Sartre was "debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered." Sometimes it's hard to tell what really enrages James most: Sartre's apologies for Communism, or the fact that he beat James to the punch in opposing Nazism.In light of Sartre's socialist sins, Being and Nothingness is written off here as an update of Heidegger's "high-flown philosophical flapdoodle"... the product of "a mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in [...] its own compromises with reality." Now, in Heidegger, we have a man whose conduct under totalitarian rule deserves all the opprobrium that can possibly be heaped upon it. But Being and Time cannot be dismissed as "flapdoodle" on the grounds of biography alone. Nor can Being and Nothingness, whose author has the advantage of having participated in the Resistance. In fact, both Sartre and Heidegger were keenly interested in the mind's compromises with reality, though they didn't conceive of it in those terms (see, for example, Being and Time, Part One, Division I, Section V).It's likely that Heidegger's agnosticism on the subject the Other (later critiqued by that self-interested Witch-Doctor Emmanuel Lewinas) enabled his early political enthusiasm for Hitler. But it's also possible to hang Heidegger out to dry on the grounds of his own definition of authenticity. Sartre, too, for that matter . To the extent that they endorsed or excused (respectively) totalitarian regimes, Heidegger and Sartre could be seen to have fallen short of their own philosophies. But to reach this nuanced verdict, one has to have actually tried to understand the philosophies in question, and James can't be bothered with philosophy (not a great quality in a cultural critic). Even Hegel and Kant get his goat. I had always thought of the anti-intellectualism and paranoia as a combination peculiar to the American far right, but apparently it can afflict Aussie humanists, too.V.Which brings me to "Walter Benjamin," the essay I hailed above as a fine piece of fiction. It's not historical fiction, in that it doesn't hew closely enough to fact. But as a work of imagination, it's audacious.Okay, I'll admit it... I'm being unfair to James. But only because James is unfair to Walter Benjamin. Apart from being a thinker whose sensibility - which can in no way be construed as ideological - has changed my life, Benjamin should be enrolled among James' angels. He was a victim of totalitarianism, killing himself in the Pyrenees when it seemed he wouldn't be able to escape the Reich. But because Benjamin practiced a syncretic version of Marxism, and would become popular, posthumously, with leftist academics, James can't let him die with dignity."It remains sadly true, however, that he is more often taken for granted than actually read. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is the Benjamin essay that everybody knows a little about. Whether its central thesis is true is seldom questioned, just as the value of his work as a whole is seldom doubted. His untimely death was such a tragedy that nobody wants to think of his life as less than a triumph. But there had already been many thousands of Jewish tragedies before his turn came, and what is remarkable for the historically minded observer is just how slow so brilliant a man was to get the point about what the Nazis had in mind. About the other tragedy, the one in Russia, he never got the point at all."How terrifying it is to see a fine mind in the grip of ideological fervor... I mean James', of course. How terrifying the totalizing flatness of the phrasing: "his turn came"; "Jewish tragedies." How awful the statement that Benjamin's death was less remarkable than his failure to get the hell away from Hitler, the tiny insinuation that somehow his death was his fault. And how bizarre to take Benjamin to task for not having "got the point" about a tragedy he didn't live to survey the extent of. And then James has the gall to tell us he's doing Benjamin a "courtesy!"In real life, Benjamin is pretty widely read, and "The Work of Art" is well known precisely because its central thesis isn't really up for debate. A quick comparison of James' "proof" that this thesis is bogus with the thesis itself reveals that James hasn't understood what Benjamin means by "aura." Not even one bit. Normally, the James method would be to chalk this misunderstanding up to Benjamin's obscurity - he goes on and on about Benjamin's "all-inclusive obscurity" - but he's made the mistake of granting that "The Work of Art" features "a general point designed to be readily understood." So why can't James understand it? If I may expropriate some other lines from this essay. "His life story gives us the answer: he was cushioning reality. It needed cushioning."Of course Benjamin's reality, James tells us, was anti-Semitism. (And if he knew what was good for him, the implication is, he'd have written about that, in the form of journalism, rather than theorizing about Parisian cafes (shopping arcades, actually.)) But what reality can a successful TV personality, in his (I'll say it) idiotic dismissal of a cultural giant, possibly be cushioning himself against?VI.That reality is the world we now find ourselves in. The Soviet bloc has collapsed, without affording Clive James the chance to prove himself worthy of his heroes. Nazism, though it still persists, has dwindled. Only in the past few years have the lines for a new global conflict have been drawn. That the good guys have so far not acquitted themselves heroically challenges James' picture of liberal democracy as a system that doesn't require progressive intervention or even vigilance (only totalitarian ideologies have such requirements, he thinks). And so, rather than refine his model, James saddles up and goes looking for enemies. Too often, he finds the wrong ones.Given the amount of cannibalizing he's done of his own body of work here, an odd palimpsest effect sets in... as if James is trying to reshape decades of enthusiastic reading and writing into a brief against the new enemies of civilization. Between the fits of intemperance, ignorance, and magnificent self-satisfaction are principled reflections on those who actually have blood on their hands, on Trotsky and Goebbels and Mao. And though it's often said that it's easier to write a bad review than a good one, James writes insightfully about figures like Albert Camus, whose art and political record were both sterling. His encomiums extend to literary critics, philologists, and historians from all over the world, and have left me with a list of writers I'm eager to read. I don't know enough about Gianfranco Contini or Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to do anything other than enjoy James' writing on them.In his role as a bourgeois provocateur, however, James is too willing to substitute ardor for attention, attention for smartness, smartness for intelligence. Cultural Amnesia is always ardent, often attentive, frequently smart, and sometimes intelligent. And boy is it learned. About the big things, it's absolutely right. As students of culture, we must connect the dots. We must take a stand against oppression, against mass murder.But we know that already; we want our new humanism to help us with the details (with Guantanamo, with nuclear proliferation, with the ongoing totalitarian tragedies in North Korea and Iran). And it's the details where James' claims to humanism get dicey. He would rather praise that paragon of moral imagination, Mrs. Thatcher, than actually calibrate the human cost of the laissez-faire branch of economic determinism. (I can't resist quoting this little cascade of reasoning (read closely, now): "She should have trusted her instincts and shut out the smart voices [...] Her best instinct was to stick to a simple course of action once it had been chosen. That instinct became her enemy, and the enemy of the country, on those occasions when a simple course of action is not appropriate. In domestic policy it hardly ever is.")What we can take from Cultural Amnesia, in the end, is a largeness of ambition, a breadth of learning, a catholic sensibility, and a heroic belief that culture can be a matter of life and death. But we must explore the finer points of art and history for ourselves, and reach our own conclusions. We must be intelligent readers. We must be careful not to let Clive James' "necessary memories" stand in for our own.

A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

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Let's say you're slightly to the left of the Bell Curve: you read, on average, a book a week. And let's say you're also slightly leftward-listing in your survival prospects: that, due to the marvels of future medicine (and no thanks to the blunders of contemporary foreign policy) you'll live to the fine old age of 90. Let's furthermore presuppose that you're one of those people, the precocious ones who were reading Kesey and King and Kingsolver and Kipling at 15. How many great books will you get to read in a lifetime? Assuming you've already answered the adjunct question (why?) for yourself, the prospect of having to choose only three thousand books from among the many Millions may sound daunting. My Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of World Literature contains some entries on authors alone, and is hardly comprehensive. Balzac alone could eat up almost one percent of your lifetime reading. On the other hand, as usual, limitation shades into wonder... because in an infinite reading universe, we would be deprived of one of the supreme literary pleasures: discovery. Half of my favorite works of fiction of the year were by authors (women, natch) I'd never read, had barely heard of: Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place, Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy, and Mary Gaitskill's Veronica.And if I had gone my whole life without discovering Deborah Eisenberg, I would have missed something like a literary soulmate. The beguiling, bewildered quality of Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes - the sentences whose endings seem to surprise even their writer - is so close to the texture of life as I experience it as to be almost hallucinatory. On the other hand, Eisenberg's world is much, much funnier and more profound than mine. She's single-handedly rejuvenated my relationship with the short story... and just in time for the remarkable new Edward P. Jones collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children. I've already expressed my suspicion that Jones has been a positive influence on Dave Eggers, as evidenced by What is the What. So I'll just round out my survey of new fiction by mentioning Marshall N. Klimasewiski's overlooked first novel, The Cottagers - a dazzlingly written thriller.In between forays into the contemporary landscape, I've been trying to bone up on the classics. I'm ashamed to say I hadn't read Pride and Prejudice until this year; it's about the most romantic damn thing I've ever encountered, and I'm a sucker for romance. Pricklier and more ironic, which is to say more Teutonic, was Mann's The Magic Mountain - a great book for when you've got nothing to do for two months. Saul Bellow's Herzog completely blew my doors off, suggesting that stream-of-consciousness (and the perfect evocation of a summer day) did not end with Mrs. Dalloway. Herzog is such a wonderful book, so sad, so funny, so New York. So real. I can't say the same thing about Kafka's The Castle, but it is to my mind the most appealing of his novels. As in The Magic Mountain, futility comes to seem almost charming. E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate was another wonderful discovery - a rip-roaring read that's written under some kind of divine inspiration: Let there be Comma Splices! Similarly, I was surprised by how well page-turning pacing and peel-slowly sentences worked in Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Ultimately, it's sort of a ridiculous story, but it's hard to begrudge something this rich and addictive. Think of it as a dessert. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the rip-roar of that most sweeping of summer beach books, Lonesome Dove. And if the last three titles make you feel self-indulgent, because you're having too much fun, cleanse the palate the way I did, with the grim and depressing and still somehow beautiful. Namely, Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing or W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn. (What is it with those Germans?)Nonfiction-wise, I managed to slip away from journalism a bit, but did read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men while I was in Honduras... sort of like reading Melville at sea. I made it most of the way through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (God knows why, half of me adds. The other half insists, You know why.) Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment lightened things up... Not! But I will never read Cosmo Girl the same way again. Come to think of it, pretty much all the nonfiction I loved this year was a downer, about the impure things we can't get away from: Susan Sontag's On Photography, Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, and especially the late George W.S. Trow's astonishing, devastating Within the Context of No Context. Lit-crit offered a little bit of a silver lining, as William H. Gass' A Temple of Text and James Wood's The Irresponsible Self. Wood's essays on Tolstoy and Bellow remind me that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God"... which is, I guess, why I'll keep reading in 2007.