Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West by Erin Hogan

The Director of Public Affairs for the Art Institute of Chicago, Erin Hogan, "wanted something joyful and dreadful, fierce and high"(1). Considering where she works, that sounds like an easy enough itch to scratch. However, Hogan required something that can't be found in a museum. She felt the need to get out of her comfort zone, to get away from "being surrounded by a constant clamor of voices- of strangers, of friends-and el trains and car horns and music from passing cars and the rhythms of the boys drumming on overturned buckets on the sidewalk"(1). She "wanted to learn to enjoy being alone"(1).

Hoping to scratch this mix of itches, Hogan took a road trip to see some of the major pieces of American land art. She chronicles the experience in a thoughtful and entertaining book,Spiral Jetta, a mix of art criticism and travel narrative.

Originally, Hogan intended to visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels , Michael Heizer's Double Negative, James Turrell's Roden Crater, Walter De Maria's Lightning Fields, and Donald Judd's complex in Marfa, Texas. She drove a Jetta, hence the title of this occasionally punny book.

The art-criticism side of the book records the ways these classics of what is often referred to as Land Art matched and missed her expectations. Related to Minimalism, Land Art set out to disturb the relation between viewer and object. To the extent one can define it as a movement, Land Art aims to create experiences of the sublime.

With Land Art, size matters. Using the earth, actual landscapes as their canvas and material, the artists above set/created objects within natural spaces in the hopes of overwhelming and disorienting potential viewers. The resulting works not only wont fit in a museum, but, theoretically, the setting of the object is part of the art, integral to it. Object and setting are one; the created object can only achieve its effect within the natural environment in which the artist originally placed/created it. Ultimately, an atmosphere is sought. Ideally, within that atmosphere, the viewer experiences a dislocation. He or she loses a sense of self, inundated by the austerity and grandeur of their surroundings.

Despite the fact that the works highlighted are often thought of part of a movement, Hogan's direct experience of them tends to point toward their differences. Spiral Jetty is a more traditional piece of art; at it's core, there is an object, a design, that might be appreciated outside of the space it occupies. However, the object achieves a greater expression by virtue of it's location on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. The lake has coated it over the years with a salt coating per Smithson's intention. Spiral Jetty was submerged under the lake for some years, only to resurface in 1999. Upsetting the notion of the artist, "the artists behind land art surrender control of their objects to natural processes"(28).

Hogan also believes that the setting of Spiral Jetty is important in establishing the work's effect in another way. She describes Smithson's masterpiece as "a spiral of rocks and dirt approximately fifteen hundred feet long and fifty feet across"(2-3). Within museum walls, this would be a big, monumental piece. Yet, as Hogan presents it, set on the desolate shores of the Great Salt Lake, under the wide sky of its surroundings, Smithson's work seems almost forlorn, quaint. At the mercy of the elements, it's peristence amidst an indifferent setting acquires a pathos.

Double Negative, a long, interrupted, gash that Michael Heizer blasted onto the edge of a Mesa in Utah, is the opposite. Far from constituting an object, it is a vacancy that confronts viewers with the dwarfing magnitude and desolation of their surroundings. Unlike traditional artwork,it is impossible for a normal, grounded viewer to see it in it's entirety and at once. To do so, one must look down from far above, as in the picture immediately below. With it Heizer intended to "defy the passage of time"(101). To this point, time has responded by continually eroding the clean lines Heizer intended for his gash.

These works are meant to scar the land, to compel attention through their size and location. Critics have complained about the coercive and blatant nature of these works; they demand attention rather than compel it in a gentle and suasive fashion. Yet, Hogan discovers they're hard to find, even when she draws near them. She never does actually locate Sun Tunnels or Roden Crater. Writing of the travails involved in visiting Spiral Jetta, Hogan notes, "how could a work be described as intrusive...if one had to travel so far, so uncomfortably, and with such determination to see it"(23).

Many prove hard to 'find' figuratively speaking. Her experience of several of the pieces proves strangely deflating. Far from delivering moments of awe and shock as intended and expected, several of the pieces visited leave Hogan feeling underwhelmed. At one point, she confesses "I needed to come to terms with the fact that this monumental art of the 1970s had turned out to be less than transformative. I had yet to have an experience that truly lifted me out of mysef and reengaged me with a sense of awe and wonder"(122).

Then, some of it is just hard to find. Costing potentially 20 million dollars, Hogan describes James Turrell's Roden Crater as an "inverted planetarium" filled with interior caves from which "ethereal yet sculptural forms will appear"(107). Yet, despite it's size and cost, Hogan is unable to find anyone to show her the crater despite numerous attempts to contact folks and institutions associated with the project. She is never able to find Sun Tunnels and only locates Spiral Jetta and Double Negative after a lot of driving around lost.

Hogan begins to question whether the effects of the art she set out to see can possibly be worth the difficulty and cost of achieving and viewing them. As she drives through the often majestic West looking for these pieces, she often encounters landscapes that wow her more than the art she set out to see. Most of the land art visited was designed to, in the words of the critic Michael Kimmelman, provide "heightened perception"(108). The author wonders whether such "'heightened perception' was the natural state of being for those who live in the West,"(108) rendering the works unnecessary.

De Maria's Lightning Fields is the first piece that elevates her perception. The work is set on a piece of land a mile long by a kilometer wide. Within that space, De Marie place four hundred identical steel poles at regular intervals. The poles are set at varying depths in the earth so that their skyward tips all meet on an imaginary plane.

Visitors to the field are driven out to the sight by an assistant of De Maria's and must stay overnight in a fairly rustic house. While the work may have been designed to speak it's piece during lightning storms, Hogan is struck with it even though she visits during a twenty-four period of temperate weather. She finds it especially striking at sunset and sunrise when the poles gradually but suddenly appear and disappear as the light strikes or leaves them, casting an intriguing and entrancing skein of shadows on the land. At one point, she experiences a moment where "the atmosphere itself, the air and the light, becomes so powerfulthat one can't experience anything else"(130).

Finally, Hogan finds pleasure and solace in the methodical and basic installations of
Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas. Judd was not a landscape artist per se; he came to fame as a sculptor and founding father of minimalism, an art movement that made a religion out of context. Howver, like Land Art, Minimalism sought not to create objects but atmospheres.

Judd did not make an essential distinction between his objects and the setting in which he placed them but viewed them as integral, equally important. Accordingly, he not only created sculptures but the "museums/spaces" in which they need be seen. The majority of these are sited at a campus of building in and around Marfa, Texas. According to his will, "'works of art which I own at the time of my death as are installed at 101 Spring Street in New York City ...or in Marfa, Texas, will be preserved where they are installed'"(145).

Judd is the ultimate control freak. Beyond trying to create an atmosphere, he is intent on imposing a view, not a metaphorical one, but an actual, through-the-eyes view. His installation 100 untitled works in mill aluminum are 100 boxes, all slightly different, set up in an old artillery shed. Judd redesigned the shed, putting in large windows along the walls so that the boxes are "seen in generous daylight. Also, tours only go through the shed during the late morning, noon and afternoon. While this is owing to a lot of reasons, Hogan suggests that it is another instance of Judd meticulous and obsessive attention to creating a specific experience for viewers.

In sum, with Marfa, Judd wished for viewers to focus on a specific experience without any distractions; everything within the spaces he created is created by him. The critic Michael Kimmelman describes the "impact as hypnotic"(152). According to Kimmelman, in demanding the viewer pay his installations a certain quality of attention, Judd confers on art "a dignity that becomes a moral point. Again quoting Kimmelman in interpreting 100 boxes, Hogan sees the work as "a metaphor for how to deal with each other, which is to say, one at a time and patiently'"(156).

Hogan's record of her journey is an interesting and she has a knack for presenting complex art work and the ideas surrounding it. If you've ever wandered off into the thickets of modern art commentary, the latter is no mean feat. This book truly is an education in a significant swath of contemporary art. Hogan is also a good sketch writer, drawing lively portraits of various places she visits along the way: Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, a dive bar in Montello, Nevada, and sprawl of Juarez, Mexico. She also manages to deftly weave her experience of these places into her thinking on the art she encounters, as when she questions whether anyone could create a work as surrealistic and disorienting as Juarez. By her account, Juarez truly seems a slice of reality that beggars the best products of human imagination.

Her account lacks a bit of narrative drive and not for a lack of building blocks. For instance, at the end of the book, we discover that prior to her journey she tended to believe in an art-for-art's sake aesthetic. The art she encountered on her trip forced her to see how art could alter the world. In particular, The Lightning Fields "drove [her] to attentiveness and continues to give [her] a stage and the mechanism to fully experience my surroundings"(168). This seems like a significant shift. Yet, this shift in them is only mentioned at the end of the book and she never actually spells out what this shift entails in her everyday life. Still, it is interesting and enough is there to imagine how it might affect a person.

What's most disappointing is that Hogan never explores whether she discovered the pleasures and benefits of being alone. This was one of the central goals of her trip and she simply fails to address it at the end of the book. I've long been interested in the art covered in this book. However, I'm even more interested in the challenges, practices and benefits of solitude and solitary existence. This seems to me our present cultures great, untalked about fear. Hogan's raising it and then ignoring it disappointed me greatly. Perhaps, a lot of this is between the lines.

"An emissary sent from the lord": the complex relationship of Jack Boughton and John Ames

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is a version of the prodigal son story with interesting differences. In Gilead, the role of the disgruntled and righteous older brother is taken up by the best friend of the forgiving father. And, while it is apparent that the prodigal son welcomes and seeks the forgiveness and love of his father, this doesn't appear to be his central concern, nor to entirely satisfy him. Instead, the prodigal son in Gilead, Jack Boughton, seems to desperately seek and need the love and forgiveness of the disgruntled, righteous friend of his father, the Reverend John Ames. Of course, it appears so from Ames narcissistic perspective.

The mystery and drama of this novel lie in the tortured,love-hate relationship between Jack and Ames. A perverse kind of bond exists; each dislikes the other while needing the other's approval. According to Ames' belief, Jack and himself are meant for each other, destined to rely on the other for salvation.

Their relationship is a father and son one. Jack calls Ames "Papa." Perhaps according to Jack's intentions, Ames bristles at Jack's referring to him in this way. However, at some level, it is true in fact. Ames is Jack's godfather; being a believer, Ames takes the role seriously. As Jack's godfather, Ames feels an obligation to his soul and worries that he has failed him.

Boughton had the child christened in Ames' name as a gesture of love and thanksgiving toward his best friend. It was to be a gift revealed to Ames when he asked the baby's name prior to christening him. This well intended gesture misfires horribly. Ames is taken aback by it. Since losing his own short-lived, tragedy marked immediate family, Ames has envied Boughton his large and prospering one. In the face of the disparity between them, Ames is defensive around Boughton and his family. He is sensitive to any suggestion that somehow his now gone immediate family is or was a lesser blessing than Boughton's large and flourishing one.

While Ames might be too polite to say so to himself or God, he clearly reads the disparity between his family and Boughton's as an injustice. Such injustice doesn't square with his beliefs. To shelter these, Ames simply refuses to think of the situation as a disparity, an injustice, and denies his anger at God.

His anger seems to find its locus in Jack from the boy is christened in his name. Ames claims that when he first hears of Boughton's gesture at the boy's christening, it wasn't "resentment I felt then. It was some sort of loyalty to my own life"(65).

With time, Ames' resentment and distrust of Jack gathers real reasons. Jack is a troubled kid who from an early age enjoys annoying others by engaging in senseless acts of vandalism and theft. Then, while in college, Jack impregnates a very young girl and refuses to deal with the situation. He neglects the child and its mother. Indirectly, his neglect leads to the child's death. As Ames must see it, even if unconsciously, Jack is given and wastes a blessing denied Boughton. He compounds his sin by showing little remorse. However irrational it might be, Ames views Jack's misdeed as an affront to himself. Moreover, he commits a sin that touches directly on the great hurt of Ames' life, and puts to the test Ames' ability to show Christian forgiveness.

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Jack is the cross of Ames' life. Until he returns, Jack is a cross from the past that seemed past, and a cross that Ames contrived to forget. When Glory mentions early on to Ames that "Jack might be coming home...It actually took me a minute to think who that was" (18). When it comes to Jack, Ames is wary and defensive; his attitude seems to be one of "please, let this cup pass." Yet, Jack is truly Ames'cup.

Ames is a rather saintly soul on one level; however, as he himself fears, his has been a rather cloistered holiness. When Jack returns, seeking forgiveness, comfort and refuge, he brings Ames' another cross. Ames seeks to see and thus love others as God sees and loves them. His path to sainthood, his holiness has one obstacle: his distinctly unchristian feelings toward Jack.


Although he's central to Ames and his life-story, Ames first mentions Jack on page 72. Jack's sister Glory stops by to tell him Jack is returning. Glory is "excited and also anxious"(72). Ames hardly shares in her emotions; he laments "I suppose he'll appear sooner or later"(72). Everything Ames says in this first mention of Jack is demeaning; his every word seems contrived to render him unimportant. Ames first refers to him as a boy and then "corrects" himself. He feigns uncertainty as to whether he's in his thirties or forties. He makes passing allusion to "a story" that he might relay. Then decides he'll first "talk with [Jack]" and then decide if "all that trouble is well forgotten"(72).

Jack has come home 86-87

Jack "paid a call." "I have never felt he was fond of me."91 Ames' wife is "visibly surprised" to meet this namesake of her husband which leads Jack to conclude "'I gather bygones are not bygones yet, Reverend.' What a thing to say!"91-92.

"'You're looking wonderful, Papa!' he said, and I thought, ...the first words out of his mouth would have to be prevarication." Ames is sitting in a porch swing. He experiences difficulty getting up; "there was Jack Boughton with that look on his face, lifting me onto my feet by my elbow. And I swear it was as if I had stepped right into a hole, he was so much taller than I than he'd ever been before"(92). Figurative rendering of the way Jack somehow lessens Ames perception of himself. Jack brings out something in Ames that his wife and child see clearly; "I caught a look on your mother's face and yours, too, which I know could not have been because of the contrast we made. You didn't wait till this morning to realize that I am old. I don't know what it was I saw, and I'm not going to think about it anymore. It didn't sit well with me"(93-94). Jack "couldn't stay for coffee. Things went well enough. Then he was off"(94).

In this meeting, the recording of the fact that Jack "really is the spiting image of his father in terms of physical likeness"93.

Next, Ames comes home and discover his son and Jack playing catch.101 At the tail end of this encounter, mention again of the likeness between Boughton the father and Boughton the son, Jack: "This Jack Boughton could be his father, to look at him"(102).

Ames goes to ostensibly visit old Boughton. Jack and his sister Glory are working in the yard. Boughton is "in excellent spirits. 'The children,' he said, 'are putting things to rights for me.'"(116)

In two criticism/comments that seems ideally self-directed, Ames writes "I have always like the phrase 'nursing a grudge,' because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts."(117) Next, "I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on."117-118

Jack comes by to see if Ames' son wishes to play catch. Always looking to dismantle any positive aspect as simply appearance, Ames notes "[Jack] was sunburned from working in the garden. It gave him a healthy, honest look." Neither offering his invitation nor his feelings at its rejection, Ames simply states, "[Jack] said he couldn't stay for supper. You were disappointed, as I believe your mother was also."119

Jack comes "strolling by" again, shortly afterward. "He sat himself down on the porch and talked baseball and politics-he favors the Yankees, which he has every right to do-until the fragrance of macaroni and cheese so obtruded itself that I was obliged to invite him in."119-120

Again, betraying by his language his reluctance to believe in Jack's integrity, Ames observes Jack during supper and writes of "this [my italics] John Ames Boughton with his quiet voice and preacherly manner, which, by the way, he has done nothing to earn, or to deserve. To the best of my knowledge at any rate. He had it even as a child, and I always found that disturbing. ...it seems to me sometimes that there's an element of parody in it."120 "Of sheer and perfect preacherliness I have never seen a finer example than this Jack Boughton, heathen that he is, or was." During his visit to Ames, Jack "mentioned that [Ames] had not been to see his father in a few days, which is the truth, and no coincidence either...it had been one of the gret irritations of my life, seeing the two of them together."120

Ames fills in the back story on Jack in a roundabout fashion. He realizes that he bears a grudge against Jack and wonders and worries that he is not being fair. Perhaps, he's holding overlong to past hurts. A vain man, Ames worries that he's acting in a manner unbecoming to himself. This worry surfaced earlier on when he noted the way his son and wife looked at him when he was talking with Jack earlier.

Conscious of appearing petty and unforgiving, he is hesitant to simply dish the dirt on Jack to his family. He admits "[Jack's] story may be more than you need to know, more than I ought to tell you. If things have come right, what is the point. There's nothing very remarkable in the story, in fact it is very commonplace. Which is not an extenuation by any means."121

While he seems to be losing control of his own manners, Ames complains "[Jack's] so respectctful I feel like telling him I'm not the oldest man in the world yet."(122)
Yet, around Jack, basic manners become a conscious effort: "Young Boughton came by again this morning...I'm trying to be a little more cordial to him than I have been...and he looks me right in the face, as though he wants me to know he knows it is a perfomance and he's amused by it...Most people will go along with you in these situations, whatever their private thoughts might be"(123). Then, using an expression he applies to Jack on several occasions, he continues in oblique fashion: I hesitate to call it devilment, but it certainly does make me uncomfortable, and I'm fairly sure that is what he intends"(123).

Suggesting his possibly providential nature, Ames believes Jack can read his innermost thoughts. In Luke 12:2-3, Christ warns "there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known. Accordingly, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops." Psalm 44 speaks to Ames' state as well: "If we had forgotten the name of our God [by failing to forgive or show mercy to Jack].../ Would not God have found this out? For he knows the secrets of the heart."

Unable to "somehow contrive to think graciously about him"(123), Ames goes off and prays. For Ames, praying often seems more a retreat from the world than an action upon it. On some level, Ames is alert to the possibility of jack's return being a piece of providence, a test, a divine reminder that he needs to put his too long untended soul in order. In fact, at one point, he "hopes there's some special providence in his turning up just when I have so many other things to deal with, because he is a considerable disruption when peace would have been especially appreciated"(122).

In an attempt to unravel the purpose in his providentially "turning up," Ames sermonizes:

"When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you....What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me...you are free to act by your own lights."(124)

Jack brings to light Ames' failings. A lack of graciousness.123

A persistent defensiveness; while confessing this fault, he underplays it: "I know I am touchy about some things"(122). Age is one of them. The very term touchy might be understatement. It is interesting to note how Ames and his wife are seemingly unable to find a way of communicating about Jack. One can easily surmise that she picks up on topics he's "touchy" about and simply avoids broaching them. Not only does this suggest a power imbalance at the heart of their relationship, it indicates that when it comes to sensitive topics, Ames is a bit more than "touchy" about them.

Jack also exposes Ames' hypocrisy and vanity. These qualities are apparent to the reader of his account. Sometimes, they reveal themselves in small ways. Thus, he admits in his account that he didn't "write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think that I didn't know any better"(28). Although he protests otherwise, he's clearly hopeful that his wife will read and save the lifetime of sermons he's stored up in the attic. He mentions them repeatedly.

Ultimately though, Jack has over time become the locus for Ames' questioning of God; he would seem to be exhibit A in Ames' feeling that God is not fair. His existence and behavior throws Ames' very faith into question. When Ames speaks of how all the people we encounter are emissaries of the Lord, he goes on to describe them as benefits insofar as they allow us to "demonstrate...faithfulness"(124).

Again, Gilead is the prodigal son story with provocative twists. In the Gilead version, there aren't two brothers but two fathers. The one forgives an undeserving Jack. Yet, this fails to satisfy Jack. He seems to want and need the forgiveness and love of his other father, Ames. It is as if his own father's easy and immediate love and forgiveness is not enough for Jack. Ultimately, he wants to somehow justify and earn his forgiveness and love.

Again, the two seem destined for each other by providence, as if each were assigned to the other as a trial through which they will gain their salvation. It is not clear whether they pass it. When Ames' grandfather finally leaves his son and his family, he pens them a note detailing his reasons. Ames' father and grandfather have battled over the idea of nonviolence and peace their entire life without resolution. Rejecting his son's pacifism, Grandfather Ames expresses a sentiment which captures the unresolved situation between Ames and Jack at the end of the book: "No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace"(84-85).

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Gilead is a diary/letter ostensibly from elderly,dying minister, John Ames to his seven year old son. Ames intends that the boy will read it as an adult, long after he's gone. This is the central fiction/hope underlying Ames' writing. As such, it lends it an aura of honesty that is not always or entirely deserved.

Ames' intentions in writing it shift throughout the course of the book. In the beginning, his primary goal is to give the boy his history, or, as Ames terms it,"his begats." Yet, even here early on, Ames' own interests and obsessions dominate the focus of his writing.

In writing of his and the boy's history, Ames devotes a great deal of attention to his sons grandfather, John Ames. The senior John Ames is a prophetic abolitionist, who helps to found Gilead as a respite and sanctuary to those aiding John Brown in Kansas. Grandfather Ames is a stern, uncompromising man who is willing to resort to violence in pursuit of a cause he deems righteous. He is certain of God's will, having a rather personal relationship to Him.

His grandfather's shadow looms large over Ames' history because he looms large over Ames. Comparing his own beliefs and courage, Ames sees himself as vitiated version of his grandfather, an untested and lukewarm man.

His insecurities thus awakened, his history becomes an apologia for his quiet life spent ministering the Christian gospel in Gilead, a dying, small town in Iowa. Speaking of Gilead, Ames' brother warns him as a teen,"you might as well know what your sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater...leaving here is like waking from a trance"(26).

Ames is a Christian philosopher and the book is full of his meditations on grace, forgiveness and providence. While the philosophy can get heavy going, Ames' thoughtful and eloquent prose is seductive. The book is full of provocative thoughts and meditations eloquently stated; Gilead is replete with quote-worthy aphorisms. However, there is a certain patness to his thinking. The reader quickly joins Ames' in his worries that his convictions have never been refined or challenged by a true test.

Still, it is hard not to like Ames, to be charmed by him. He is capable of expressing an infectious, childlike wonder. He gushes with love for the world. By his lights, the world is blessed by, infused with, God; anyone who pays it sufficient attention is bound to share the blessing and achieve a communion with the divine.

Ames' wonder, hope and faith appear remarkable given the tragedy that has marked his life. As a young man, Ames loses his wife as she attempts to give birth to a daughter who dies shortly after. Scarred by the loss, Ames spends a great part of his adult life alone. He fills his his solitary days and nights with prayer, mediation and study. He grows old ministering a withering flock that he loves in a distant fashion.

According to his retrospective self-fashioning, Ames maintains "that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing"(55). His darkness is broken when a young woman, Lila, shows up at his church seeking religion. Despite the age gap, despite his efforts to resist his attraction toward her as unworthy, Lila becomes his wife and the mother of his son. Ames comes to see their coming together as an instance of grace, God's blessing him with love and knowledge of Himself. Ames recounts, "I learned a great deal from the experience....it enlarged my understanding of hope, just to know that such a transformation can occur. And it has greatly sweetened my imagination of death"(203).

Yet, this experience ends up comprising a rather small part of his memoir. Furthermore, given their central place in his story, Ames' beloved son and wife are rather vaguely defined characters, especially when compared to the sketches he offers of himself, his grandfather, his best friend Boughton, and his nemesis, Jack Boughton.

Finally, Ames' writing is ultimately high-jacked when his nemesis Jack Boughton returns to Gilead unexpectedly. Though unsure as to what brings black sheep Jack home, Ames views him as a threat. However warranted, Ames' distrust of Jack offends his own conception of himself as a Christian. Moreover, he's silently aware that there is an obsessive quality to it. With Jack's return, Ames' writing becomes a record of Jack's past and present doings in Gilead, an opportunity for Ames to reflect on their longstanding and tortured relationship. Ames ends up confessing,"I have mainly been worrying to myself, when my intention from the beginning was to speak to you"(202).

Estranged from his family for the past twenty years, Jack, as he's called, returns to Gilead to see his ailing and doting father. Jack has a troubled past and has deeply wounded everyone close to him. However, when he returns, everyone sense a change and is eager to forgive and embrace him, with the exception of Ames who seems to bear some particular grudge against him. Out of Christian pride, Ames is eager to hide his antipathy and distrust, although it is clear to those around him. Similarly, Ames holds back from writing to his son about Jack's misdeed and why he distrust him but ultimately does. He holds out for a while: it is only on page 155 that Ames finally "bear[s] witness against him"(155).

Jack's past misdeeds are numerous. His chief offense occurred in college when he fathered a child with a "very young girl" living on the wrong side of the tracks in Gilead. The event profoundly shames his father. Jack compounds the sin by refusing to acknowledge or care for the child. Despite the efforts of the other Boughtons to provide help, the baby girl is neglected by its teen mother and eventually dies as a result. Jack's behavior especially rankles Ames, still mourning and questioning the senseless death of his beloved child many years before.

Yet, even before this incident, Ames had a problem with Jack. Jack is not an easy child to like. As a youth, he engages in all sorts of malicious behavior, vandalism and theft for no apparent reason other than to irritate and shame those around him. Ames suspects Jack of deliberately testing his and others' capacity for Christian forgiveness and love. Ames is convinced that Jack is a shrewd psychologist. According to Ames, Jack has the ability to see through people, to locate and expose others' foibles and failings so as to explain away his own.

However, Ames' aversion to the boy in part originates in his own failings and weaknesses. Jack was christened John Ames Boughton, as a tribute and gift to Ames from his best-friend and fellow minister,Robert Boughton. However, Ames has never been able to accept this gift, instead seeing it as an affront, a suggestion that somehow the blessings of his life are lesser than those given Boughton. As Ames frames it, Jack was "the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend, who gave him to me, so to speak, to compensate for my own childlessness"(155). Secretly, Ames has long resented Boughton and his large and prospering family. Ames is obviously bothered and affronted when he compares Boughton's with his own situation. Boughton's "gift" surprises and opens an old wound.

Prone to introspection and doubt, Ames fears that his long harbored dislike and suspicion of the boy is driven by his own failings. Worse, he worries that his petty aversion has played a role in Jack's failed life. Going all the way to the moment of his christening, Ames wonders if "the child felt how coldly I went about his christening, how far my thoughts were from blessing him"(188). Although quick to disavow this as magical thinking, he does confess "I have never been able to warm to him, never"(188). By Ames' convictions, this constitutes a sin, an abrogation of his Christian duty.

Ames is writing for the future. His account has a guarded quality to it. Yet, Ames' ego prevents him from realizing how in cowardly and indirect ways, his foibles and secrets come out. He may not be an entirely open book, but a good number of his pages are legible. As he rather humorously describes an earlier attempt at self-assessment, "I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn't deceive myself, either"(203).

Ames is well named: he is full of good thoughts and intentions. He aspires to live a good life. However, his notions of it have grown limited, possibly circumscribed to a smallness thanks to the reclusive and quiet life he's lived. He's grown a little too comfortable and self-involved after all these years in Gilead. This shows in his mention of his elderly parishioner Lacey Thrush, who "died promptly and decorously, out of consideration for me, I suspect, since she's been concerned about my health"(57). The dying Ames claims that in her passing Thrush gave him "a lot to live up to, so to speak. At any rate, she didn't keep me awake past my bedtime, and the peacefulness if her sleep contributed mightily to the peacefulness of mine. These old saints bless us every chance they get"(57).

For Ames, a life should be a blessing. Blessings connect us to and reveal the divine. Ames writes, "There is a reality in blessing...it doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that." To bless another is to become a vehicle of the divine. When done properly, Ames claims "the sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time"(23). To bless another is to raise them up by imparting to them a sense of their divinity. Perhaps jokingly, Ames even goes so far as to suggest he may have conferred such a benefit on a batch of kittens he blessed as a boy imitating his father who was a minister.

Ames is a tragic case. The bulk of his life has been holy. One gathers that he has truly blessed the folks around him. He has a saintly aspect. As he's leaving town, Jack himself, in partial reference to Ames and his father, remarks "You're all saints"(242). Yet, at some level, it is hard to say if Ames manages to overcome the last remnant of hatred in his heart: his hatred of Jack. Before Jack leaves, Ames blesses him. He tells him he's a good man. Yet, he only does so once he realizes that Jack is no longer a threat to him. He does so after it becomes apparent that doing so will incur no real cost or sacrifice.

One gathers that the time to bless and reach out to Jack was long ago and Ames squandered the opportunity. A sheep went missing and he left it at that. In a reverse of the bible parable, the shepherd Ames may have given his days wandering after and tending religiously to ninety-nine sheep. Out of selfish bitterness and envy, he neglected the one he needed to pay special attention to. He knows this and he can't make it right. A sad story.

"Keep in Motion. Think of Beauty": Salvation in Jane Hamilton's Map of the World

In Jane Hamilton's thoughtful novel, A Map of the World, the fictional couple Alice and Howard live on a piece of romanticized Americana: a Wisconsin dairy farm. Alice remembers it as "the cheapest four hundred acres we could find"(11). It is largely Howard's idea, and neither Alice or Howard is really a farmer, by training or heritage. Their neighbors resent them, see them as interlopers: "it was common knowledge in Prairie Center...we had no business moving into a place that had been in the Earl family for three generations"(11). At the end of the novel, finding themselves in Chicago, Alice quips "I thought that we are where we belong, city people returned to the city"(384).

Yet, this is simply bitterness. The loss of their farm is emblematic; their farm defined Alice and Howard to themselves and the world; it provided them with a mission. Their farm was the body to the soul of Alice and Howard's family/marriage. After they move away, Alice laments "the farm was not as dear to me as flesh, but nearly so...the ground was something that I could have knelt down on and kissed, tried to embrace"(323-324).

The farm and her family, its demands and responsibilities, serve to bind and steady Alice. Early on in the story, waking up to the smells of the farm and her home, she experiences "a brief glimmer of truth....the stink and mess, the frenetic dullness of farming, our marriage, the tedium of work and love-all of it was my savior. Half the world seemed to be scheming to escape husbands or wives, but I was planted firmly enough, striving, striving, to take root(5).

Beyond this, the farm with it's unvarying routines, its ancient patterns,its mix of dirt and order, expresses for Alice the solidity and certainty of Howard. She finds the one in the other and both offer her an existential reassurance. Identifying the two, Alice observes "[Howard] was so good at fixing and managing, tending to details," and then adds, "the barn was as beautiful and clean a barn as could be found in all of Christendom"(88).At one point, Alice restates the connection between Howard and the farm. It is becomes more than simply an expression of Howard. Instead, he is figured as a part of it, and through him, she gains a connection to something transcendental. For Alice, Howard provides a connection to a whole: "When Howard farmed he looked as if he didn't have to do anything much more than pick up a shovel and start digging to be part of the landscape. I don't mean in a pictorial way, but actually part of it, part of the dirt, the sky, the growing things"(323).

All of this is concisely expressed in the opening pages of the book in which Alice recalls the last morning before disaster strikes. On that day, she awakes to a siren. Uncertain as to its origins or meanings, she gains her bearings by picturing in her mind "Emma and Claire [her children]...asleep in their beds, and my own heart seemed to be beating regularly. If the barn was out the window,clean, white, the grass cropped as close as a golf course, the large fan whirring in the doorway, then my husband Howard was alright." Then, untrusting soul that she is, Alice raises herself up to "to take a look. It was still standing, just as I supposed it would be," and jokes to herself "Everywhere that barn goes, Howard, you are sure to be close behind"(1).


The novel explores the possible connection between place and character. Claiming it as a truth, Howard expresses an idea that is central to the novel: "all our meanings are put upon us from the outside. There's nothing much inside that belongs to us at the start, or even along the way. We are shaped, time and time again, by luck, the prevailing winds. I had been formed and reformed a dozen times, according to the personalities of my housemates"(219). At this point, Howard is trying to continue on the farm without Alice, so he equates the "outside" with "housemates." However, I think that the novel has a wiser and more expansive notion of place, one which encompasses landscape, work/institutions particular to a landscape, and the people who inhabit the landscape. In considering the connection between place and character, Hamilton is concerned with the way this broad idea of place affects character.

In particular, Map of the World contests the wholesome effects of life on a family farm. Of course, the whole question might be moot. Hamilton suggests as much. Alice and Howard's farm is pictured as vestigial, surrounded by suburbs. Also, it is not a true family farm. Despite his best efforts to claim the history of the farm, the history he's at pains to know and preserve truly belongs to the family that he bought it from and who farmed it for three generations.

Still, the notion of life on a family farm as a crucible of character and virtue persists in the world of this novel. Despite the fact they're in desperate need of money, Alice's lawyer Rafferty strongly advises Howard and Alice against selling the farm to raise her bail money. Howard and Alice as farm owners is crucial to his defense, "the one thing that should prove to the judge the quality of [their] citizenship. [Rafferty] used the words synonymously: upstanding, moral, hardworking, four hundred acres, sixty head of cattle"(239).

However, the family farm is not really possible or salutary without the family. When Alice is arrested, Howard quickly realizes he "couldn't farm without a wife, that there wasn't any point in farming without a family"(239). Again, Howard realizes a central idea of the novel. Any given place is determined by its people and loses its force and unique stamp if it loses any one of its constituent parts.

Howard comes to this truth gradually. After he loses his wife, he leans on other aspects of his place in an attempt to recapture the solace and blessings of his former life. He throws himself into work. He attempts to find a replacement wife in Theresa. Nothing satisfies. Nothing allows him to regain a shred of the old place he occupied before.

Built into the conception of the family farm as virtuous is the notion of hard work as virtuous. Hamilton's book contest this truth as well. Work is pictured ambiguously throughout the book. In the passage above where she speaks of the farm as her savior, Alice is clearly alluding to all the work that is involved in running a farm. However, as Alice rightfully observes, work might be both cure and curse. In the days just after the accident, Howard finds relief in the demanding work of the farm; "he had his blissful routine, hours in which work was rest"(52). Howard exhorts Alice to follow his lead, demanding she "Bear up...Go get breakfast. Keep in motion, for the sake of Emma and Claire. Keep in motion"(89). However, Howard pursues hard work as a means of escape as well; throwing himself into the routine of the farm shields him from thinking about the horror of the accident. It makes him unavailable to his wife who is unable to follow his lead and is in dire need of his sympathy.

In the book, motion of all types is often viewed with suspicion: a means of escaping pain, hurt and suffering. We foul our nest and in a rootless, modern, post-agricultural world, we simply pack up the car and start anew elsewhere. Howard clearly harbors such notions when he tells the girls that "[they] were going to pack up everything and then pretend [they] were hobos, living in freight trains, eating out of tin cans, singing all the day long, sharing one towel, living the carefree traveling life"(250). Obviously, Howard offers this largely in jest. Yet, his joke contains his fears and hopes, albeit in an exaggerated fashion. Deep down, he's tempted to think that if he launches out on a new life, he will forget the old and shed it's hurt and pain. Ultimately, Howard comes to "realize that...the only thing you really need bravery for is standing still. For standing by"(259).


Howard's sentiment is nostalgic, suggesting people were once better people because they led less mobile and busy lives. The roots a family farm imposes may be a mixed blessing, but still they bless. There is a virtue to being stuck in a place, and a farm will fix you to a place. Attached to the land, a farmer is unable to simply escape tragedy and disaster by packing up and leaving. It's worth noting, how Howard and Alice are 'stuck' in Prairie Junction after the accident while Dan and Theresa go off on a long trip. The novel would have us believe that this rootedness is central to a person's coming to grips with the realities of life, most especially the difficult and seeming senseless realities. At the end, it raises the question of where we find something that will anchor us.

Both Alice and Howard yearn to recapture a way of life. This way of life occurred on the family farm where they first moved after being married. They are stripped of the farm. They can't return. Yet, both hope that somehow, they can recapture their way of life. They ultimately stake their hope of doing so on each other. In part, they stick with the other because that other remains the only element of their former life that they any longer have access to. This book has an open ending but a sad one. Neither Howard or Alice seem confident that together they will be able to regain the place nor the selves they once inhabited.

Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

"Although I long ago lost faith in the idea of Truth, I knew that once I spoke, the stories would take on their own shape, their own truth. In my darkest hour I doubted that there was even a lesson to take from the rubble of time. But whatever the moral was, I knew I needed to fashion the pieces together, and to myself, before all of it came tumbling out, the essence drifting heavenward, gone before I understood what it was"(274).

Reading Jane Hamilton's novel Map of the World, the Book of Job came immediately to my mind. Far from simply being an update of the Bible's classic tale of suffering, Map of the World seems a commentary on it.

Hamilton's take on suffering differs in important ways from The Book of Job. In Hamilton's powerful novel, Alice, a diary farmer's wife who works winters as a school nurse, serves as the Job figure. However, unlike Job who feels his trials as undeserved, Alice feels guilty. Remarkably, her voice is so compelling, at points, the reader's inclined to agree. And, unlike the situation in Job, Alice is not alone in her suffering. Her acts, her suffering, her failings, occasion suffering in those around her. Her tragedy nearly breaks apart her family; it brings about rifts that may heal but will leave scars. It exposes rifts. Near the end of the book, Alice observes: "evil had been done to us, and...we, in our turn had injured those around us.

Alice varies in the responsibility she assumes for her suffering. As to it's cause or justification, sometimes Alice speaks of her suffering as if it were evil done to her and at other times as if it were evil she did.

The novel opens with the books central event. To give each other some free time, Alice and her best and only friend Theresa have agreed to take turns watching each other's children on Monday mornings. While watching Theresa's girls, Alice temporarily loses track of Theresa's toddler daughter Lizzie. Tragically, unwatched, Lizzie wanders off and drowns in a pond on Alice's property. Alice is distraught and nearly suffers a nervous breakdown. She's spared this by the advent of a second tragedy. Alice, who works as a school nurse in the winter months, is suddenly arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct involving children who came to her with illnesses. Unable to raise bail, Alice is sent to prison while she awaits her trial, and is separated from her husband and two young daughters and from their family dairy farm.

Looking back on this nightmarish sequence of events, Alice speaks of how she "fell from grace," and not in a sudden or as the result of one, large mistake. The experience leads her to conclude, "it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap"(3).

A question that the book raises is whether Alice is indeed a Job figure, a by and large innocent sufferer, or whether her suffering has been occasioned by some sort of failing, or, in the language of religion, sin. Seeking meaning, realizing there can't be any without her bearing some blame for what's happened, Alice quite naturally crafts her role in the matter. And, she's not entirely deluded.


In her mind, Alice has take too casual an attitude to certain truths. Prior to her fall, she failed to fully realize and address certain shortcomings, certain truths about herself. Identifying her failure with a Christian conception of sin, Alice comes to realize that for her "God [the presence in contrast to the absence marking sin] was something within that allowed me to see occasionally"(388). This vision, allowing her to see herself with clarity, only comes after the tragedy, after the misfortune.

At the outset, Alice is blind in a number of ways. On a literal level, she fails to keep an eye on Lizzie and the toddler wanders off to drown in a pond. She is blind on a figurative level. By Alice's lights, Lizzie dies because she failed to she what's demanded of her as a mother, a caretaker of children. Her failure is actually her failures. Judging herself, Alice believes herself guilty on a number of fronts: her house is messy and full of hazards; she's secretive; she's easily distracted, eager to escape the reality of her situation and go off on childish daydreaming spells; she's in poor control of her temper and emotions.

As Alice sees it, all of her admittedly small failings come together in a kind of perfect storm in the sequence of events surrounding Lizzie's death. In the moments when the toddler wanders off to her death, Alice is variously distracted. Her daughter Emma throws tantrums and acts irrationally in a manipulative and successful play on her attention. Alice needs to go off and find her bathing suit and because her home's a wreck, her search takes a great deal of time. Then, she has to tend to her daughter Claire, who is attempting to swallow pennies left on the floor. Still looking for the swimsuit, she comes across maps of an imaginary land that she drew as a child. She spends a great deal of time looking over childhood fantasy maps of a world she drew as a means of escape from an unhappy childhood. As she judges herself afterward, these moments with the imaginary maps seem especially damning. While she was supposed to be keeping close eyes on a child, she instead sought escape in the very same manner she sought it as a child.

Her guilt nearly destroys her. She gradually begins to fall off the edge of her world and spend her days sleeping, unable to dress or feed herself, unable to care for her children. Then, just when all seems darkest and lost, salvation of a sort comes in the guise of a greater tragedy: Alice is falsely accused of molesting a child, a disturbed, neglected and hard to love child named Robbie Mackessy. Alice is bundled off to a horrible jail, her bail is set at $100,000, and the entire community turns against her and her family. Worse, although Alice has never molested Robbie, she does come to admit in the course of her narration she did once strike him in a moment of frustration with the difficult boy. As with her guilt over Lizzie, here too Alice has moments where she thinks she deserves this injustice. She clearly can't accept or forgive herself for striking Robbie. She also wonders if maybe her being punished regardless of the reason might begin to provide atonement for all the sins she and other adults have visited on Robbie.

In her self-condemnation, Alice is convincing. At least initially, I was drawn into it. I found myself coming to judge her for her carelessness, her inattentiveness, her inability to focus. I began to liken her situation to that of a drunk driver who kills someone. Many do it, but that doesn't excuse the lapse in those whose mistake results in hurt. Then, when that situation seemed to harsh an analogy, I began to think of Alice's situation as akin to that of a person who drives carelessly and fast on a neighborhood street and strikes a child. Alice has it out for herself. I almost felt manipulated as a reader. Caught in the midst of a senseless tragedy out of which she's trying to make some sense, she needs a villain, even if it's herself. She needs punishment insofar as it provides evidence of misdeed and sin, and misdeed and sin explain the death.

Yet, I only realized this after I put the book aside and gained some distance from Alice. Alice is careless, irresponsible and inattentive but only in the way many if not most of us are. She's a flawed human being. In trying to account for accident and tragedy, she turns these failings into sins.

The clear vision she gains at the end is honesty. She owns up to hitting Robbie. She owns up to her imperfections. She begins to try and accept Lizzy's death as a senseless tragedy. This is her victory. Many books might present a tragic and senseless accident and have the characters begin to make sense of it. Hamilton suggests that a healthy wisdom lies in learning to live and accept imperfection and tragedy as just that. At some point, attempts to explain and atone become simply attempts to escape the realities of our existence.

"After Eden" by Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner's "After Eden" is both a personal, individual story and a collective one potentially engaged with provocative political questions.

Two groups serve as foci in the book. There are the members of a lesbian land collective in California's McKenzie Valley, Beulah Ranch. It is home to a diverse collection of lesbian couples: Jewish, earth-mother Ruth and her eleven year old daughter Joyce; spunky, Chinese-American, small-scale vintner Lindsey and her older, African-American, graduate student girlfriend Marianne; Biology teacher, salt-of-the-earth Virginia and her working class, UPS truck-driving lover, Sally; and, urban-planner Emily and her lover, Salerno, a jazz saxophonist. These women are the founders and land owners. Beulah also provides community/family to a number of additional characters, as equally diverse as those just listed, who share in the community's activities but don't own land on the ranch..

The fictional McKenzie Valley, situated in the mountains Northeast of San Francisco, serves as a second, broader focus. It is a much less formal and organized 'collective' than Beulah Ranch. As sketched by Miner, various groups have called this fictional valley home, interacting and badacting with each other: Russians, Spaniards, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Anglos, vintners, farmers, yuppies, migrant workers, and loggers. Again, another diverse lot. The book is kind of grasping when it comes to diversity in a Noah's ark kind of way. Yet, while the diversity is a little much, the various communities and families in the novel present a host of good questions: what makes a place home; what gives you a right to call a place home; how do we learn to share a place so that it is home to many.

Miner anchors these panoramic, group perspectives with a more traditional, narrative of death and loss. The novel begins with the urban-planner and urban-minded Emily Adams driving from Chicago to spend the summer with her lover, Salerno, at their cabin on Beulah Ranch. Emily arrives a bit before Salerno to Beulah, a place Salerno's has slowly sold Emily on as place of renewal, a place "of unleashrd vitality"(10). Salerno "saw the land as a new home and the women there as a kind of family"(16).

Emily would seem to be of this family and yet apart. While she's friends with the Beulah women, her primary connection is to Salerno, and deep down, right until the very end of the book, she lives apart, in her head. She questions "'Who are friends?'...could you b friends only with the members of your own tribe?...What if you didn't have a tribe?"(99). At the outset, it would seem that Emily's 'tribe' consists of Salerno alone. Arriving at Beulah, Emily's first impulse is to hideaway and wait for Salerno before opening out to the world. Unfortunately, Salerno never comes.

Tragedy strikes when Salerno's plane crashes. Salerno was Emily's entree into the Beulah family and the Valley. Introverted, intellectual, it was Salerno who brought Emily out of herself and introduced her to these worlds. Without her, Emily is inclined to leave Beulah, to flee a place now irrevocably marked by loss. Despite her own impulses and instincts, Beulah and the family it fostered acts like a home, claiming her. When she first returns at the outset of the novel, she inadvertently, half-consciously refers to it as home in the course of conversing with Phoenix, her dog, and she wonders whether the term applies. Emily spends twelve months trying to leave; Beulah Ranch, land and family,calls her back.

Of course, what calls her back may seem circumstance: Ruth's accident keeps her awhile; Lindsey's pregnancy keeps her; a newcomer to the community draws her attention; her San Francisco based brother, distant heretofore, begins to try to connect to her while she remains in the McKenzie Valley; she commits to teaching migrant workers. However, all of these circumstances are related to the fact that Emily has become a part of something. She's entered into a community and found a home. Ok, maybe she's found herself in a home. Regardless, home is what keeps her from following her grief fueled impulse to leave. Home asserts its claims on her being.

This is a political novel of ideas. It has its flaws. Characters are a bit flat, most especially a two-dimensional fundamentalist Christian who proves to be the villain. Or, in this case, ends up "temporarily in a prison for the criminally insane"(244) which seems a weak way to damn opponents you can't bring to life.

Ultimately, as a political novel, I think it fails most particularly on one front. Miner presents the Mackenzie Valley is a diverse collection of peoples whose interaction is marked by conflict. Beulah seems to serve as a relatively peaceable kingdom offered in response. Yet, I'm not certain that Beulah presents a future for communities.

Beulah and the MacKenzie differ in profound ways. Beulah is diverse in some ways. The residents have various ethnic, racial and age differences. However, in the end, they all pretty much think alike. Moreover, Beulah is a community by choice while the Mackenzie is a community of circumstance, a far more common variety of community. Community by choice may seem benign and to be desired. Yet, communities by choice often need to be maintained by harsh methods of exclusion. When Sally begins to act in a manner harmful to the ranch, she is let go. Good for the health of the ranch. Bad for the health of Sally. Perhaps this is what Communities need to do to maintain their peace, but this is hardly a picture of community as a caring family, despite the fact that Miner often applies the family tag to Beulah.

The Finality of the Self-Richard Ford's Lay of the Land

Ever the English major, Frank Bascomb, the narrator of Richard Ford's "Lay of the Land," resorts to protesting the inadequacy of words but hardly ever lets a moment of silence enter edgewise. When faced with the big feelings, he's likely to try and say something about them. Language almost might be seen as a diversion from feeling. Of course, technically speaking, Frank is not 'writing' or 'speaking' what we read. He is simply thinking. However, Frank's thinking has a certain congruence with writing. It is composed. It is continually being edited.

The foundational fiction of this book is that Frank is both living his life and at the same time engaged in a conversation upon his experience. This is an internal conversation. Ford doesn't imply or try to weave the reader in as a character, an unspeaking ear to whom Frank is addressing himself.

Of course, this is hardly rare in fiction. Yet, Frank's conversation is distinctive in it's obsessive quality: nothing goes unremarked and all must be made sense of. Furthermore, I refer to what is technically a monologue or soliloquy as a conversation because I think the latter term more accurate. His soliloquy is a conversation in that it involves one aspect of Frank's self addressing another aspect, or version, of that same self.

Also, Frank is often, when not arguing, trying to entertaining so as to divert. To his father's chagrin, Frank's son Paul whiled away many hours of his adolescence with a ventriloquists dummy. As with many things his son does and is, Frank is ashamed of this hobby. Perhaps it is too telling. The desire to hide behind a persona seems something they share.

Again, Frank's argumentative monologue hardly marks him as unusual. I suspect many of us harbor an idealized picture of ourselves, a thoughtful person that speaks the voice of reason and virtue; most likely, this is the person we wish to be seen as but are unable to pull of. Alongside the ideal, is the self we pull off so to speak, the self that manifests itself via experience, a self that often falls sort of the cool, ideal, rational person we aim for. This failed, real self that is forever explaining, justifying and resolving itself anew to the better, wished for self. That self is silent but speaking. We know what it says; it doesn't actually have to say anything. Or, perhaps to put it another way, everyday, fallen, human self is engaged in a conversation with his conscience, with the truth.



It almost seems at points as if Frank just keeps talking/thinking in hopes that he'll somehow, perhaps by sheer dent of words, somehow dwarf, silence or outlast his conscience, his authentic self. But, to no avail. It comes to him at last, and at a time and place he thought safe, far removed from his world: a lesbian bar he chances into on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Yet, it is here that the reality he's assiduously evaded forcefully finds him.

His Wednesday's been a mixed one. While Frank estimates that three "occurrences" in his Wednesday have been of a "positive nature...versus only two and a half of a low quality," prone to exaggeration and self pity, Frank maintains that "any of the latter events would be enough to set a man driving to North Dakota, ending up at a stranger's farmhouse...pleading amnesia and letting himself be sheltered for the day"(338). The events he recounts aren't especially out-of-the-ordinary, but...

In an attempt to escape, seeking anonymous, undemanding company, Frank repairs to a bar, The Manasquan. span style="font-style:italic;">The Manasquan almost fifteen years prior as a part of a group of newly divorced men. The bar has changed in the interval. It is now a lesbian bar, a dive, renamed The Old Squatters. Shortly after entering, the bartender ("she...is entirely in black-jeans, boots, tee-shirt, eyeshadow-everything but her silver flat-top, ear decor and TERMITE tattoo" and featuring an "enormous Jim Bowie sheath knife" on her belt(331))asks Frank if "you sure you wuz meetin' your friends in de right place here"(330). Without saying it aloud, far from feeling misplaced, "he couldn't be happier than to be here amidst fellow refugees"(330). By Frank's lights, The Manasquan is perfect: "the light's murky, the smells are congenial, the world's held at bay"(330).

The scene serves as one of many instances where Frank seeks/hides out in places or positions of detachment. Frank is continually trying to find ways to keep the world at bay. Far from simply chasing it away, he seems to welcome some level of contact with other human beings. However, he insists on a certain distance and on some ground rules. Whenever anybody grows to close, or a relationship is in danger of developing, he begins to retreat. Frank fears the responsibility and self-exposure real relationship impose. He fears the feelings involved. He fears the fact that despite those feelings, we have little control over the decisions and fates of those we grow close to. He seeks a middle ground relationship, one that delivers the comfort of human relationship without incurring any of the potential costs.

In pursuit of this middle-ground, Frank attempts all sorts of quasi-relationships, situations involving sincere but disengaged contact. At one point in the novel, his first wife, Anne, recalls how Frank visited her second husband when he was dying of cancer. Ann praises Frank for doing so. Frank doesn't find it a feat; in fact, "it didn't bother me....I could imagine someone having to do it to me-a total stranger- and how nice it would be to have someone there you didn't have to 'relate' to"(152-153).

Frank is always looking for disengaged, impermanent contact. In his former hometown of Haddam, he looks to lunch at the hospital where "restrained but understanding smiles are all that's ever shared...Nobody opens up or vents (you might complain to some poor soul worse off than you)"(78). Feeling the encroachment of family on Thanksgiving morning, Frank makes an impulsive and desperate trip to locate an old flame, Bernice, to bring home for dinner. Bernice is Frank's ideal woman. Around her, he feels witty, handsome, charming and loved. But, he also recognizes that relationships with such ideal women need to be of short duration. According to Frank, such ideal woman "drive him crazy with undeserved approval and excessive, unwanted validation"(427). In summary,

these women are...meant for sweetly intended, affectionate one-nighters (two at the max), after which you both manage to stay friends, conduct yourself even better than before...but never consider getting serious about, since everybody knows that serious ruins everything. (427)

Frank biggest attempt to find disengaged contact is his participation in "Sponsor Line." Modeled after AA, Sponsor Line is a service devised in response to syndicated article which ran in the local paper decrying the fact that a majority of folks polled revealed they had no friends. Sponsor Line attempts to remedy this by allowing Folk to call it at anytime and arrange to have another human being come by, listen to them, and offer them some "sound, generalized, disinterested advice"(92).

Explaining the appealing features of the program, Frank points out that "nothing technical's required to be a sponsor: a willingness to listen, a slice of common sense, an underdeveloped sense of irony, a liking for strangers and a capacity to be disengaged while staying sincerely focused on whatever question greets you when you walk in the door"(92). In addition, Frank claims "sponsoring has never actually produced a greater sense of connectedness in me, and probably not in others...It could happen. But the truth is, I feel connected enough already. And sponsorship is not about connectedness anyway. It"s about being consoled by connection's opposite"(96).

In his account of Sponsoring, Frank offers a varied, somewhat contradictory account of what he believes people who call "Sponsor Line" are after. Initially, he claims they are after a little bit of common sense advice on practical issues: what to do with a boat you impulsively bought without learning how to sail it; how do I handle a nice maid that shirks her work; how do I sharpen this hunting knife (pp. 12-13, 93). However, he mentions in passing that recently three different sponsorees (i.e., one of the folks requesting a sponsor) has been looking for something other than "plain, low-impact good counsel and assistance"(93). All three wanted to know whether Frank, a sponsor, a stranger of sorts, thought "he or she was an asshole." And, as would most compassionate folks sitting face-to-face with another human asking that question, Frank answers "[he] definitely didn't think so"(94). Those who know any of us might not be able to offer us a similarly unqualified and consoling answer.

Frank never calls "Sponsor Line" himself. Partly it's pride. Partly, despite all his dishonesty and efforts to evade the truth, Frank seems irresistibly drawn to it, to a rigorous if delayed self-assessment. His self, with all it's history of failure and pain, finds him despite all his efforts to hide from it. The process begins with his chancing upon a real estate ad in a free paper he picks up at Old Squatters. In the free weekly, he happens upon a real estate ad in which there is bio of an agent who lost a child. The ad triggers something in Frank. Suddenly, he finds himself "immobilized on my stool...heavy-armed...my highball glass...small and distant," and he finds "my [deceased] son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy's sake, age nine), comes seeking audience in my brain"(343). Protesting the inadequacies of language, Frank confesses "I am then truly immobilized. And with what? Fear? Love? Regret? Shame? Lethargy? Bewilderment? Heartsickness? Whimsy? Wonder? You never know for sure, no matter what the great novels tell you"(343).

Apparently, this moment is the moment that Frank acknowledges his son's death, truly accepts it, almost twenty years after the fact. Moments later, in his car and unable to find the keys, he experiences "the somberest of thoughts; the finality of one's self in defeat of all distractions put in the way"(349). Later, alone in his home, he admits that

"all [his] years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it...now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance [of]...the fact that my son...would never be again in this life we all come to know too well"(357)

At one point, Frank tells his friend Wade "There's been a lot of 'it's' this year,"(320), meaning testing personal disasters and catastrophes. Frank's had cancer, been left by his wife, had a confused daughter move-in, ect. While Frank's being self-deprecating in his comment to Wade, he is sort of a Job-lite figure. Yet, the it that truly littles him is the death of his son, that he can't face, proves to be the death of his son. Of course, early on, he lets on that this it is a part of the past. He mentions it. Speaks of the pain of it. Yet, he hasn't accepted it. Hasn't been able to process it. He now claims that he's reached an acceptance of it, the permanence of the death of his son. Yet, his eager desire to 'accept' it, to feel that he's reached the limit of the confusion and pain it causes him, may be just another in his attempts to negotiate, accommodate, an it that refuse to be negotiated, accommodated, made sense of.

Impermanence-Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land

Readers of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land are privy to three days worth of the minute by minute thoughts of the books central character, ex-sports writer, NJ sea-shore realtor, Frank Bascombe. Given such access readers may expect a tidy, comprehensive portrait of a man. Yet, having finished this fabulous novel, I think its fair to say, they won't come away with such a picture. In fact, that's a bit of the point. Novels have tidy characters. Real people are vaster and more confusing than the folks we typically find in novels.

It's not that Ford fails to present a reality. Frank Bascombe's very real; I'm sure folks must ask Ford how Frank's doing. However, he lacks the definition we associate with the characters found in novels. Instead, like many of us, he's a character of contradictions, secrets, layers, and evasions. He's a little bit good, bad, and confused. He's kind, thoughtful and resolute one moment, coarse, cowardly and impulsive the next. To the extent you can fix him in this fun-house mirror of a novel, you're likely to see yourself. If you're brave. Or, if under fifty, maybe you'll mistake him for your dad. But, that would be a mistake.

Readers read to find characters. At the outset of this book, a detailed, stream of consciousness[ok, free indirect discourse], charting his Thanksgiving weekend circa 2000, Frank claims to be such a character. He presents himself as a with a self that is recognizable, without a clearly defined outline that is stable over time. This is not an accident, but rather the product of a decision he took in about 1992. At that time, he

realized....[very little]...except what I'd already done, said, eaten, etc.-seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor.. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that. I needed to go out and find myself a recognizable and persuasive semblance of a character.(53)

By Frank's estimate, he came to such a juncture by way of waiting, by hanging back from life. As he relates, "I'd felt since military school in Mississippi-as if life and its directives were never quite all they should be, and in fact, should have meant more"(52). According to him, faced with this sense, Frank launches himself into what he labels "the permanent period," or, a phase that might be seen as the psychological equivalent of Francis Fukuyama's much lampooned notion of the 'End of History.'

As Frank himself comments at one point, "...there are too many ways to say everything."(53) This is certainly true of the permanent period, which at various turns is presented as a phase, a choice, a virtue, a vice, a feeling, a belief and a philosophy. More a state of mind than a precisely worded creed, Frank nevertheless is attached to it with a religious devotion.

To enter into the Permanent Period is to be opposed to the idea that ones world is in the process of becoming. To be in the Permanent Period is to let the past rest, to forego thinking about or trying to right wrongs from the past. A person in the Permanent Period is focused on accepting himself; he is resigned to looking in the mirror and saying 'this is who I am.'

By his admission, Frank is launched into it by "a hunger for necessity, for something solid, the thing character stands in for"(54), by a sense of being finally brought "hard up against what felt like my self"(53), it is not necessarily a self-improvement program. Instead, frank maintains the Permanent Period is opposed to the everyday, detail-shot, worry-misery-gnawing mind-set"(159) and "dedicated to saving you from [it] by canceling unwanted self-consciousness, dimming fear-of-the-future in favor of the permanent, cutting edge of the present"(160).

In the distilled form, reduced to the nutshell I've just fitted it to, Frank's philosophy/lifestyle/religion reveals its...flaws. As he presents it in bits and pieces, with humor, and in response to events, it comes across as wise and feasible. However, as one can see in retrospect and upon reflection, his philosophy is an impossible one.

Frank's attempts to seal himself off in the present, safe from the past, the future, and the unmanageable disasters and responsibilities attendant upon them, proves fruitless. It's almost as if his attempt to do so invites an inordinate amount of chaos and disaster upon him. His past refuses to lie down: his wife leaves him for her ex-husband who they'd presumed dead; his ex-wife confesses that she's come to realize he's a kind man and tells him she wishes to remarry him; and memories and feelings surrounding the death of a son at age nine refuse to go ignored. The August previous he's discovered he has prostate cancer. His real-estate associate, Tibetan immigrant Mike Mahoney (Ford rather slyly contrasts but mostly compares Mike's Tibetan Buddhism with Frank's Permanent Period thinking)decides it's time for him to expand his professional horizons. His daughter breaks off a long-time relationship with a woman and returns home to get her bearings. He and his son seem to share an antipathy, but his son refuses to simply stay put, away, in Kansas City, where, to Frank's shame, the son employed writing smart-ass card copy for Hallmark and engaged to a one-armed Anita Ekberg look-alike. Frank assumes the relationship is intended to provoke him.

Thanksgiving weekend brings all these difficult situations to a head. Ultimately, under the stress of events, of a past that refuses to go away and a future that won't hold off, Frank cracks. Specifically, he comes to realize his entire Permanent Period outlook is an attempt to block out the death of his nine year-old son's some twenty years before. The passages when he finally faces this past, recalls the death, the grieving, contain terribly heart-wrenching writing. Frank recalls, "When our sweet, young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath...Ann and I, in one of our last, free-wheeling marital strategizings-we were deranged-sought to plot an 'adventurous but appropriate' surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time's embrace"(356).

Frank confesses to "years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it" and admits "these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful non-acceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that...my son, too, would never be again"(357). Yet, while Frank claims to be wiser, to have come to a self-knowledge, the reader is less likely to feel so sanguine, to trust that one can ever entirely, or always, accept death, loss and suffering. Frank is constantly trying to come to a point where he's touched his hurt in its entirety and it can hurt him no more, or no differently. Yet, he starts out so convicted only to discover he's fooled himself. And, one can't help fearing that he'll come to find he fools himself again. As any us would. As any of us do.

Story versus history- Notes on Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost"

Earlier, in writing of Daniel Mendelsohn's history "The Lost," I wrote of Mendelsohn's contention that History is dependent on story, or narrative, despite the fact that the past often lacks elements one might suppose crucial to narrative: a certain level of detail, order, coherence, and shape. It is these elements that make story and History compelling.

His search for facts surrounding the life and death of his great Uncle Shmeil, Shmeil's wife Ester, and their four daughters (Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele, and Bronia), proves frustrating. So much seems lost. Once the Germans moved into Shmeil's hometown of Bolechow, many of the folks who survived fled or went into hiding. In both cases, there was nobody left to witness the fates of those who perished. Testimony is sparse and mostly second hand. Witnesses contradict each other, even when it comes to what would seem simple facts, such as how many daughters Shmeil and Ester had. One group of survivors insists Shmeil died in 1942, with Ester and Bronia, in Belzec concentration camp. Another set seem in a rough agreement that he joined the partisans with Frydka, and they died together at a later date. Then, there is a third story.

Providing a wonderfully concise statement of one of his book's central themes, Mendelsohn prefaces Part Four of Lost with a quote from Jose Saramago:

But the disadvantage with sources, however truthful they try to be, is their lack of precision in matters of detail and their impassioned account of events...The proliferation of secondary and tertiary sources, some copied, others carelessly transmitted, some repeated from hearsay, others who changed details in good or bad faith, some freely interpreted, others rectified, some propagated with total indifference, others proclaimed as the one, eternal and irreplaceable truth, the last of these the most suspect of all.

A proliferation of memory surrounds Frydka's short life. She is the one member of the family that all the Bolechow survivors claim to remember. Everyone's eager to talk about her. However, memories contradict a bit. She is remembered as "'a modern woman...living in the wrong time'"(298), popular with the boys, a hummingbird, as easy, as hard to get, as capable, as conniving. Recalling her stride and the way she carried her bookbag some sixty years after the fact, a contemporary of hers goes so far as to mimick the way she carried herself. Faced with this storm of memory, Mendelsohn begins to conceive of her as "the kind of girl...to whom stories and myths naturally cling"(298).

One story that emerges early on is of Frydka's love for a Polish boy (Cizko Syzmanski) and of how this boy loses his life in the course of trying to save hers. No two survivors have heard the exact same story. In some versions, she and Cizko are partisans. In another, he hides her in his house till a neighbor betrays the two. In another, he hides her at the home of a Polish art teacher. In some, she's with her father and in others she's by herself. In a couple of stories she's pregnant. One witness claims she was pregnant, but not with her lover Cizko's baby.

Speaking with a survivor and his wife about what he's discovered, Mendelsohn recalls how "because there was something about this couple that appealed to me, I wanted to say something that would please her, and would be true"(385) I think this a common impulse and one of the foibles of history.

Trying to create an acount that appeals, Mendelsohn finds himself at times tempted to render an account that has the comforting shape of story. He begins to try to work the facts he manages to glean from the various memories folks have shared with him into a resolving story. He spends a great deal of time trying to pin down and square details and testimony, in the hopes that ultimately, he will be able to tell the truth of Frydka, however partial, and the story of Frydka. That, the two will be nearly synonymous or congruous.

Referencing the temptations faced by another writer writing of her grandmother who was also a Holocaust victim, Mendelsohn writes

To become a story, the details of what happened to the grandmother, what happened in real time, in real history, to a real person, would have to be subordinated to the overall outline that already existed, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons of personality and preference and taste, in the mid of her granddaughter.(437)

He wants to tell a story; he considers the grandfather who he reveres, who "could go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk and come back with an amazing and dramatic story to tell"(438). He even comes to the point where he thinks that while "he hadn't gotten the whole of the story...hoped for, I considered it all and I thought, It's enough. I thought, Genug is Genug"(438).

Ultimately, he resists this temptation. He comes to reject it at the moment when he comes closest to the subjects of his search, Frydka and Shmeil. In the end, he discovers with a fair degree of certainty where they were shot, and as he stands in that place, he feels the specificity of their lives and the ultimate separation of his own: "their experience was specific [Mendelsohn defines specific as: that which is particular to an individual] to them and not to me"(502). He eloquently concludes: "we do know that they were, once, themselves, specific, the subjects of their own lives and deaths, and not simply puppets to be manipulated for the purposes of a good story for the memoirs and magical-realist novels and movies"(502).

The potential of History-more notes on Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost

Ancient stories from the Torah serve Mendelsohn in The Lost,his account of his search for ancestors lost in the Holocaust. Like a Greek chorus, they comment directly and indirectly upon his search story as it unfolds and the family stories he gradually uncovers.

Mendelsohn does this most effectively when he uses the Adam and Eve story to highlight the pain and pleasure that comes in acquiring knowledge. He recounts Adam and Eve's story while he tells of gathering the first fruits of his own family research. In both cases, knowledge proves a curse and blessing. Mendelsohn's knowledge blesses him by connecting him with people he presumed lost. When a near contemporary of Shmeil's daughters "acts out" how he once upon a time greeted Shmeil's ten year old daughter Bronia, hearing this old man's recollection of the moment comes close to bringing the moment back for Mendelsohn. It's as if the recollection transports Mendelsohn back to the streets of Bolechow as they existed in 1939.

However, as he grows in knowledge of his family, along with connection, Mendelsohn experiences pain. There's the pain of the truth; his family met a horrific end. There's also the pain unique to knowledge: as Mendelsohn's reading of the Adam and Eve story points out, knowledge inevitably makes you aware ignorance and the likelihood you'll never bridge it. With knowledge, you come to know what you wish to know and are not likely to ever know. In hearing an old man vividly recall his greeting to a ten year old girl, to hear him say it again with the inflection and tone he used, is to come awful close to bringing a moment back. Conversely, this very proximity also points to the gaping hole in the almost recalled moment.

In searching for his family, in his focus on the past, Mendelsohn like all historians is after something. As with all historians, he's after something definitive: an object, a letter, a location that is linked to people from the past. Yet, this something definitive is meant to serve as a tool, a bridge, to something of a more indefinite nature. The object(s) the historian gathers ideally transport him of her out of their contemporary selves and into the selves of another time and place. Oral testimony of witnesses can perform the same function, as it does when Mendelsohn hears a contemporary of his mother's cousin Frydka recount how the young girl confided her love of a Polish boy to her. Mendelsohn had heard this fact from a few people prior, who had heard it second-hand. Hearing of Frydka's love, from someone Frydka told, brought the truth of the fact home to Mendelsohn. He experienced how, "a single human memory can catapult you to a specific and now irretrievable point in space and time"(357).

Unlike professional historians, Mendlesohn's history is motivated by a family instinct. I didn't grow up in a culture of family like Mendelsohn's and I perhaps presume in commenting upon it. But, from reading his book, one gathers that family is a means of extending ones self and ones time beyond natural boundaries. In family-centered cultures like Mendelsohn's, individuals live on in the memory of their descendants. They are re-membered every time they are remembered.

This notion of extending one's life in the memory of descendants is even hinted at by perhaps casual turns of rhetoric. Thus, on the back of a photograph of himself taken on his 44th birthday, Uncle Shmeil writes that the picture was taken "Im 44 lebensjahr," which Mendelsohn deftly points out literally translates out as 'in the 44th year of life'. Shmeil may have a set number of lebensjahr, or years of life, but in so far as he's remembered afterward he has years beyond that. As a presently living member of such a family, Mendelsohn quest to uncover the lost history of his ancestors is as much an obligation as it is a seeking after knowledge for its own sake. In doing the work by which he remembers Shmeil, Mendelsohn adds years to his life. And, family does this for one another. Someone will do it for Mendelsohn, one presumes. It is an expression of a family's love for one another.

Beyond this, his search seems driven by a real yearning, born of love, a quasi-mystical hope that the process of knowing history will transport him to the past and he can become one with his relatives who died. To an uncertain but palpable extent, he can feel their pain, their anxiety, their suffering.

To stretch a point, it almost seems that in a family-centered culture like Mendelsohn's, Mendelsohn's work at remembering is what's expected, and presuming it yields a kind of comfort. One's descendants as well as one's ancestors will possibly be with you at moments of joy and at moments of suffering. Near the end of the book, when Mendelsohn finally locates with some certainty the location where Frydka and Shmeil were shot, it is as if he believes he will join them there, at that moment. Joining them, he will be able to share it, and their end wont be as lonely as it is horrible. But, alas...this doesn't quite prove to be the case.

Yet, Mendelsohn remembers for History's sake. To the extent that History must be composed of stories, the past he unearths stymies his attempt to write history. According to Mendelsohn, stories have specific features: their narratives proceed according to an orderly, cause and effect flow of time; stories have hero's and villains; essential elements (personality, locations, sequences) of the story must be known/spoken of with a certaintyl; stories must assume certain narrative shapes and patterns for them to appeal. The past he uncovers refuses to conform.

Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost

Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: a Search for Six of Six Million is as it's subtitle indicates an attempt to discover the histories of six individuals who perished in the Holocaust. It seeks to humanize a history that often gets lost in numbers. Mendelsohn's book is a record of his five year effort to touch and to feel an historical event, to recapture a moment in the past.

As a teenager and young adult, Mendelsohn harbored an interest in his family's history. In particular, he was fascinated his mother's family, the Jagers. Even more particularly, he was fascinated by his great uncle Shmeil Jager, his wife Ester, and their four daughters who died in the Holocaust. As a boy, the information he gathered and overheard on this family was scant and Mendelsohn naturally assumed that owing to their fate nothing further could be gathered. However, as he pushed and researched further, at one point traveling to the Jager's ancestral residence of Bolechow, a town in what is now the Ukraine (given their fate, "home" seems the wrong word for this town, despite the fact that Mendelsohn uncovers documentation establishing that the Jagers lived in Bolechow for some four hundred years), Mendelsohn discovers that his ancestors haven't quite disappeared without a trace. Indeed, his trip and his persistent and dogged research leads him to discover all sorts of documents, and more importantly, people who recall this family of six.

Mendelsohn's book is elegantly structured. He tells of his search for his family in a chronological order: the first chapter (1967-2000) details his burgeoning interest in the family and in particular Shmeil Jagers, the second chapter recounts he and his siblings journey to Bolechow in 2001, the third tells of their subsequent trip to Australia to visit folks who had lived in Bolechow and knew Shmeil and his family, the fourth of a trip to Israel to connect with yet more contemporaries of this family, and so on.

In the process of telling a contemporary story,his search for the Jagers, Mendelsohn recounts and comments on ancient Torah stories, from the Creation to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. He cleverly weaves the two sets of stories together, so the ancient ones comment and reflect in a timely way on the more contemporary stories of his family and his search for them.

Sometimes, the ancient ones seem almost a template, and the Holocaust stories and the stories surrounding the uncovering of those stories reflections, or iterations of the ancient stories. Thus, throughout his account of the genesis of his interest in his family, Mendelsohn writes and comments upon the Torah's account of the creation of the world. As he comes to find out what he can (and what he can't) about his family, the story of Adam and Eve provides succinct reminder of the pains and pleasure of knowledge. Throughout the second chapter, alternately focused on Mendelsohn's trip to Bolechow and the relations between Shmeil and his siblings, Mendelsohn recalls and comments on the story of Cain and Abel: from whence rises murderous hate, proximity or distance? In the third chapeter, dominated by first-person recollections of the Holocaust as it unfolded in Bolechow, the author puzzles over the story of Noah and the flood: how does it make sense of a senseless tragedy?



This is clearly intended as a history. But, it's a refreshingly and self-consciously modest history governed by values and ways more common associated with story. The book tells a contemporary story but is grounded in the ancient stories of the Torah, as it unfolds according to the traditional weekly readings of the Torah.