Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam Kirk Curnutt Cuban Quartermoon. By Ann Putnam. Seattle, WA: Skylight Press, 2022. 341 pp. $16.00. As a general rule, novels about literary conferences are a dicey proposition. The most celebrated one of the past thirty years, Argentinian author César Aira’s El congreso de literatura (1997) enjoyably blends metaphysics, science fiction, and magic realism, but its intellectual value depends on readers’ willingness to suspend credulity long enough to take seriously a postmodernist farce about a mad scientist building an army of Carlos Fuentes clones. Iván Thays’s La disciplina de la vanidad (The Discipline of Vanity) (2020) and Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (2021) are two additional entries in the genre by South American writers (Peruvian and Argentinian respectively) that suggest how attractive as a setting the literary colloquy is to equatorial writers who test the boundaries of realism. In the more conservative Anglo vraisemblance tradition, examples are more apt to veer toward the satirical extremes of D. J. H. Jones’s Murder at the MLA (1993), an intermittently amusing whodunit pastiche that gets trotted out every January as humanities faculty polish their name badges and head to seedy urban convention centers in career fits of dread and paranoia that only the Modern Language Association can inspire. The first book I ever assessed for The Hemingway Review, William McCranor Henderson’s I Killed Hemingway (1993), exemplifies the Stanley Fish-“Profession-Despise-Thyself ” self-loathing that permeates most of these parodic treatments of conferences: it features a near-shootout that erupts between “Hemingway Association” factions willing to mow each other down at a biennial meeting to prove their interpretations of the literary lion are incontestable. In a world already suspicious of literary studies, I don’t think one lacks the ability to self-deprecate to say this kind of caricature does scholars no favors. Why parody ourselves when the general population already thinks academic conferences are rodeos for eccentric kooks and nuts to canter, preen, and flick their manes? How refreshing then to crack open Ann Putnam’s Cuban Quartermoon and [End Page 126] discover a treatment of a literary congress sympathetic to the reasons we spend so much of our disposable income to attend them. As Linda Patterson Miller wrote in the 2022 Hemingway Society Newsletter, this second novel by the noted Hemingway scholar and longtime Society member takes as its inspiration the 1995 Hemingway Colloquium in Havana that the late Bickford Sylvester organized with Gladys Rodriguez Ferrero, then curator of the Museo de Ernest Hemingway. The conference took place in the dark shadow of the Soviet Union’s collapse, which plunged Cuba into a brutal period of austerity that made attendees all the more uncomfortably aware of their economic privilege. Readers familiar with some of the exuberantly colorful regulars at Society fêtes over the past forty years will inevitability wonder which characters are based on real people. Yet Cuban Quartermoon is not a roman à clef. Its ultimate point is far more important than appealing to any prurient curiosity about the identity of the attendee who, as Miller recollected, “disappeared abruptly and disturbingly for an evening at the end of the week,” only to turn up just in time to catch the departure bus clearly “injured” and claiming he had been “pushed off the cliff that lined the harbor after having ventured too far into Cuba’s complex underbelly.” While an echo of that story appears in the novel, Putnam’s more complex interest is in exploring the nature of self-discovery in foreign settings and the inevitable hints of colonialism that emerge whenever we travel abroad. The main character here is Laura Gallagher, a scholar who steps on the tarmac of the José Martí Airport already profoundly conflicted about her paper topic, which focuses on Hemingway’s suicide. (In a line that will resonate with anyone who has arrived at a conference feeling their presentation works better in theory than in practice, Laura confesses, “I’m sorry I wrote the paper I did” [16]). Each section of the novel centers upon the daily agenda of the conference, with timetables thrown off by bouts of Montezuma’s revenge, hangovers, and...