National Book Award Research Articles

Should Some Limits Be Set to the Harsh Realities Represented in Young Adult Fiction?

Sherman Alexie's novel for young adults The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) won several book awards, including the Amazon.com Best Book of the Year and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Reviewers praised the raw feelings and the intelligent humor that Alexie shows in his portrayal of a 14-year-old Native American boy who faces many of the ordeals that the author himself experienced as an adolescent: illness, bullying, alcoholic parents, racism, etc. His protagonist, Arnold Spirit Jr., shares with other young heroes such as Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield an urgent desire to escape, in his case from the constraints forced upon him by life on the Spokane Reservation. Interestingly, despite the immense courage and honesty that the character exudes, the book has become the target of fierce criticism as it is said to depict violence, sex, and xenophobia in ways that will hurt the sensibilities of young readers.

J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban

J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban H. Wendell Howard (bio) Katherine Anne Porter is rightly acclaimed as a pure literary stylist capable of presenting complex subjects artfully and economically while still penetrating with an admirable subtlety the psychological dimensions of characters. These talents are particularly evident in her novel Ship of Fools, a moral allegory evidencing, as she said, that evil is always accomplished “with the collusion of good.” Even though the persons depicted in this fiction are traveling to Germany on the eve of Hitler’s accession to power the insights she sets forth make the novel pertinent and readable for generation after succeeding generation. Like Porter, Vladimir Nabakov has laid claim to a lasting niche in the modern American literature canon with his memorable treatment of such subjects as the moral deterioration of an initially respectable person, the struggle of a politically uncommitted individual to maintain personal integrity in a totalitarian state, the farcical dimensions of the midirected passion of a middle-aged sophisticate, or, as in Pale Fire, a complex tour de force, the writing of a poem about an exiled Balkan king that elicits the king’s own involved critical comments on that poem. In Pale Fire, as elsewhere, Nabakov proves himself a master [End Page 81] of fiction that makes us as readers feel implicated, a fundamental requirement of all fiction that would be art. Finally, for our purposes here, a third writer of artistic brilliance, public admiration, and critical acclaim is John Updike. His Pigeon Feathers, a collection of short stories, lays bare his bold ingenuity and intense seriousness as a writer, and because he unflinchingly witnesses the troubled human condition and then describes what he sees with a wondering conscience, he sits shoulder to shoulder with Parker and Nabakov. So, when in 1963 Ship of Fools, Pale Fire, and Pigeon Feathers were among the books being considered for The National Book Award, they were formidable competitors for the prize. In the end, however, they apparently were not formidable enough for they were bested by J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban. This selection was surprising on many counts and requires a critical examination not only of the novel itself but also of various factors that at first may seem tangential but that in the final analysis are part and parcel of an informed literary evaluation that aims to address a book’s importance to the culture. The general subject and setting of Morte D’Urban is Roman Catholic priests in a woebegone village in Minnesota. The specific comic-opera milieu is created by a religious order, the Clementines, that is constituted of bumblers and connivers who function mostly to highlight Fr. Urban as a wily priest with ambitions for himself and the order of St. Clement. Fr. Urban, a gifted speaker, travels the religious circuit exuding a charisma that endears him to moneyed contributors who can, at least initially, endow his budding dreams. Born Harvey Roche, he had entered the priesthood because as a young man he had chauffeured the outsized Fr. Placidus and had become enamored of the life of luxury that that unique Clementine indulged in. He was determined to duplicate that existence for himself. Such a blueprint required a modernism predicated on a tolerance for moral ambiguity as well as a broadly defined view of the spiritual life that became his mantra. Because Fr. Urban soon recognized that the Order of St. Clement “labored under the curse of mediocrity,” he envisioned himself [End Page 82] to be the logical choice as the next provincial of the Order’s Chicago province. He further envisioned that he would “raise the tone [of the Order] by packing the Novitiate with exceptional men”; he would change the prevailing assessment that the Clementines were unique in being “noted for nothing at all.” What Fr. Urban had failed to consider in all this was the depth of the individual jealousy and the breadth of the hierarchical envy that absorbed the Clementine community. Thus, when the time came to elect a provincial he was accorded the “green banana.” He not only was passed over but also was exiled to the Order’s retreat...

Racism Reflected in Invisible Man

Ralph Waldo Ellison is one of the most distinguished African American writers in the contemporary era. He has a unique writing style because of his unique life experience. His novel Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. He describes the hardship of the black and the racial discrimination the black suffered in the United States in Invisible Man. This paper introduces the racial discrimination in different aspects in America through the narrator’s experience, including the narrator’s growth process, employment, and politics. He illustrates a lot of hardship the black people meet in different society. The black’s rights can not be protected and they need to be humble to the white. Because of the discrimination, the narrator lost himself and began to become an invisible man step by step. These kinds of things are unfair for the black men. They can not realize their social value under such a circumstance. So, Ellison implies that the black men should pay attention to this kind of problem and try to transform their identity from invisible men to visible men.

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News and Announcements

Listen, Slowly by T. Lai

Lai, Thanhha. Listen, Slowly. New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2015. Print.Twelve year-old Mai wants nothing more for her summer vacation than to spend her days on the beach hanging out with her best friend, getting to know her first romantic crush. Instead, her parents expect Mai to chaperone her grandmother (Bà) on a return trip to Vietnam to uncover the secrets of her grandfather’s disappearance and death in “THE WAR” over 40 years ago. Despite being raised in a home that carried on some Vietnamese traditions, Mai’s parents could not have prepared her for the heat, mosquitoes or infrequent Internet access in her grandfather’s rural northern village. In a display of her preteen angst, Mai immediately starts counting down the days until she can return to the known comforts of life back home in California.With time, however, her language skills improve and she begins to form relationships in the community, particularly with Ut, a girl her age with a serious interest in frogs, and Minh, the local teenage translator with a Texan drawl he acquired through his international studies in the United States. In Mai’s ensuing journey she travels across Vietnam, from the rural rhythms of her ancestral village to the colonial splendour of Hanoi and the humid chaos of Ho Chi Minh City. The nation’s contrasts provide her with an unforgettable summer that far surpasses anything she could have imagined with her initial Laguna Beach plans.After receiving a 2011 National Book Award and 2012 Newbery Medal Honor for Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhha Lai’s second novel continues to explore Vietnamese-American experiences. In contrast to her first book’s focus on a refugee family’s journey, Listen, Slowly examines the frustrations of a second-generation American attempting to reconcile her Vietnamese cultural deficits. Mai’s path to settle within her bicultural identity is an experience familiar to thousands of children her age, who are raised in part with traditions from their parents’ country yet never fully feel immersed in that culture. In her protagonist, Lai has created a relatable character who eventually, and maybe reluctantly, shows capacity for adaptation and resilience in the face of adversity.Lai depicts a vibrant Vietnam with verdant landscapes and mouth-watering descriptions of the nation’s notoriously fresh cuisine. The novel’s humour generally hits the mark, including a hilarious passage of cultural colonialism in which Mai convinces young Vietnamese girls to transform their comfortable underwear to thongs. While the disruption of the story’s pace during philosophical Vietnamese translations might test the patience of young readers, this challenge will be welcomed by many. Overall, this story of adventure, family history and bicultural identity is one that should have a home in all school and public libraries.Recommended: 3 out of 4 StarsReviewer: Kyle MarshallKyle Marshall is the School-Aged Services Intern Librarian for Edmonton Public Library. He graduated with his MLIS from the University of Alberta in June 2015, and is passionate about diversity in children's and youth literature.

Airea D. Matthews: 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner

Airea D. Matthews2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner Carl Phillips (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winner Photograph courtesy of Haya Alfarhan AIREA D. MATTHEWS [End Page 779] One way to read Airea D. Matthews’s simulacra—however protean in its formal strategies and multifarious in its entry-points to the restlessness that meaning mostly comes down to—is as a meditation on want, in at least two senses of the word. Want, as in desire, craving, be it for the body’s release or the differently unpredictable release that heroin offers; desire, too, to give shape and substance, in the form of language, to the abstraction of wanting. But also want, as in lack, and the ways in which our emptinesses—physical, emotional, psychological—drive us to fill them, to try to, hence addiction in all its guises, hence the impulse toward speech as the attempt to express what we somehow can never quite accept might be inexpressible. Language as rescue, language as its own sly form of addiction. It makes sense, given this reading, that the poetry itself is omnivorous, taking into itself text messages, Tweets, fable and music, personae ranging from ancient Egyptian deities to the 20th century Anne Sexton, and such theoretical, linguistic, and literary influences as Baudrillaud, Wittgenstein, and Stein. A more quiet but increasingly resonant under-note across the collection is the conundrum of race, of blackness in particular, of identity more generally. Who are we? What does it mean to want to escape the self if the self remains a stranger? What self do we escape to? In whom rests the power—the permission—both to answer these questions, and to ask them? In simulacra, Airea D. Matthews delivers that increasingly rare thing: a poetry that at once invites and demands rereading, one that shows us a possible future for the art even as it incorporates and redefines earlier tradition. Matthews makes me see the world as I’ve never seen it. Surely this is poetry’s first imperative. How rewarding to encounter so timely and lasting and necessary a voice in these strange days of ours. [End Page 780] Carl Phillips CARL PHILLIPS is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018); Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award; and Silverchest (FSG, 2013), finalist for the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004); and he has translated Sophocles' Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award in Poetry, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Currently the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

The New China

The New China Donald Stone (bio) Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 404 pages. $27; Yu Hua, The Seventh Day, translated by Allan H. Barr. Pantheon Books, 2015. 225 pages. $16; Mo Yan, Frog, translated by Howard Goldblatt. Viking, 2015. 398 pages. $17. For an outsider’s understanding of contemporary China, few books can match Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, winner of the 2014 National Book Award. The former correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the New Yorker knows that almost anything to be said about China must be qualified by a myriad of details. Yes, the Chinese of the twenty-first century “have achieved longer, healthier, more educated [and more prosperous] lives” than their predecessors. But, he notes, “The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats.” And even for those whose fortunes have vastly improved, there remains an unfulfilled appetite for less tangible values—freedom of thought and expression, a hunger for truth and spiritual values. Osnos writes with tact and sympathetic understanding, and he draws upon a number of adroitly chosen case histories to tell his story. Like Thomas Carlyle, Osnos knows that “history is the essence of innumerable Biographies.” Nevertheless, to understand modern China, one would do well to read Osnos’s excellent history alongside recent narratives by Chinese insiders, above all the country’s two best-known living novelists, Mo Yan and Yu Hua. “If all people could reflect on history and on their own lives,” the narrator of Mo Yan’s Frog declares, “mankind would not display so much idiotic behavior.” Most of Osnos’s case histories exhibit this same dual approach, beginning with Osnos himself. In 1994, the college freshman “wandered into an introductory class on modern Chinese politics, revolution, and civil war” and thereby discovered his vocation. Two years later, he arrived in Beijing for the first time in order to study Mandarin. In 1998, he enrolled at Beijing Normal University. The city had struck him as “a clanging, unglamorous place” on his first visit, so he toured the countryside, looking for “the China of literature and ink paintings.” Gradually, however, he accustomed himself to a city and country undergoing extraordinarily rapid change and development. (A Chinese friend, by way of contrast, complains that whenever he visits New York “it looks the same.”) In his eight years as a reporter in China, from 2005 to 2013, he interviewed a number of individuals caught up in the search for fortune, truth, and faith. [End Page 667] He begins with a Taiwanese army officer, Lin Zhengyi, the son of a poor barber who instilled in his children a vivid sense of China’s illustrious past, plus a “dream of China’s revival.” His fourth son (named Zhengyi or “justice”) wondered “as a boy … why, despite China’s glorious history, his family could barely feed itself.” In 1979, Captain Lin deserted his army post and swam to the mainland, convinced that “China would prosper again … and he would prosper with it.” (This was at a time when it was more usual for someone to swim from the mainland to Taiwan in search of a better life.) In 1980, the newly renamed Lin Yifu, a student now at Peking University, met Theodore Schultz, a visiting Nobel Prize-winning economist, who arranged for him to pursue a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Chicago, “the crucible of free market thought.” By the time he returned to China, Lin was “convinced that the key to China’s rise was the fusion of the market and strong government.” As an influential member of the Peking University faculty, Lin published several books extolling the “Chinese miracle.” As Osnos notes, “In 1949 the average life expectancy was thirty-six and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.” Lin’s role in helping his nation to rise out of poverty by promoting governmental and...

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Stacy Parker Le Melle (bio) Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.* When Cora, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad boarded an escape train in antebellum Georgia, fleeing the only landscape she’d ever known, the Black conductor turned around and said: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll see the true face of America” (69). At first, Cora saw darkness. So much darkness. Until they arrived at the first stop: South Carolina. The underground railroad representative who met them, a white man named Sam, assured them the following: “You’re a long way from Georgia. South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south. You’ll be safe until we can arrange the next leg of your trip.” And with that, Cora began her new life, and despite this exchange happening on page 91 of a 306 page narrative—meaning I should know better than to think this could mean happily ever after—I felt hope. I couldn’t help it. Perhaps it’s the seduction of the American dream, seducing again. A new place means hope and possibility. Until it doesn’t. On New Year’s Day 2017, at 3:30am, I finished Colson Whitehead’s gripping novel The Underground Railroad. I’d purchased the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and Oprah Book Club selection over the previous summer but had put it down early, not ready to go back to plantation life after watching the harrowing first season of the WGN series Underground. Underground showed slavery’s horrors, but also honored the enslaved characters’ will to love and protect, their mighty sacrifices made to survive. The characters transcended fiction, felt like stand-ins for our ancestors. That’s why I stayed with the show. When I picked up Whitehead’s novel again, I found horror in every direction, but the insight—and magic—went deeper with his book-length storytelling. In The Underground Railroad, we follow a young enslaved woman named Cora as she makes her way northbound, each state its own “state of possibility.” She rides trains that are magically real—the tangible “underground railroad” had been the locus of early attention for the book. Yet her journey follows a cruel pattern: whenever she finds a haven, she finds the familiar suffering behind the façade. In South Carolina, her first exit off the underground railroad, she relishes a structured new life where she can work as a domestic, live in a dormitory, and go to school. This new life feels utopian, given the tortures of Georgia; the white people seem committed to “racial uplift” and creating communities where Blacks and whites could co-exist in peace. But the tilt begins. Cora is assigned a new job as a “type” in a natural history museum. She is kept on perpetual display as an African woman rotating between scenes of an African village, a slaveship, and an American plantation. At a doctor’s appointment she must rebuff the doctor’s offer of sterilization, and later her dorm proctor’s requests that [End Page 936] she talk-up sterilization with her peers. Soon she learns that the out-of-state white doctors who had deluged South Carolina’s new hospitals were running syphilis experiments on local Black men. Cora realizes she has made a horrible mistake: If they had been sensible and kept running, she and [fellow runaway] Caesar would be in the Free States. Why had they believed that two lowly slaves deserved the bounty of South Carolina. That a new life existed so close, just over the state line? It was still the south, and the devil had long nimble fingers. And then, after all the world had taught them, not to recognize chains when they were snapped to their wrists and ankles. The South Carolina chains were of new manufacture—the keys and tumblers marked by regional design— but accomplished the purpose of chains. They had not traveled very far at all. (145) As Cora’s story progresses, she travels through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and ultimately “The...

Naming the Thirst

Naming the Thirst Alicia Ostriker (bio) When we are bornthirst makes us cry thirst surges through our arterieswhen the hormones hit when we come to witherour thirst actually increases for the tongue of touchthe dictionary of rain we remember we were once lovedit was love that kept us alive Then every facewas like the face of God every berry in the bucketsweet to the taste we were swifter than eaglesstronger than lions [End Page 95] when was thisit was in our dream and when we wakeall gone but the thirst It is dry heredry and cold in the rain of error in the sandstorm of datawe can hardly see anyone’s true face and we are afraidwe will die before anything seriously changes but we believethe Shekhinah lives we have onlyto turn to her [End Page 96] Alicia Ostriker Alicia Ostriker is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including the volcano sequence (2002), and several prose books on poetry and on the Bible, including The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (Midrash and Autobiography) (1994), Feminist Revision and the Bible (essays and interview) (1992), and For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book (2007). She has been twice a finalist for the National Book Award and received the National Jewish Book Award in 2010. ostriker@rutgers.edu Copyright © 2016 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.

Untitled, and: Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983

Untitled, and: Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983 Bruce Smith (bio) Untitled Reconsidering how James Brown [nearly] saved these United States: wherethere were laws and lengths of rope, there were other means, there were screamsthat could ease a [lost] someone [or two], what’s frightful could be yelled as in no place[church] or favelas, reservations, tent cities, movies, the super dome. Because the feelcould give you time [and mercy] and a chord change could save a nation [he believed]. [End Page 665] Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983 at the NBA All-Star game and nothing changesfor Marvin or the nation, yet everything changes in the 2 minutes and 35 seconds of voice and drummachine as he sings “stars” in 5 syllables as if counting the points of a stylized luminous thing. He singsas if he were the nomenclator for a dim-witted king running ahead of the slow procession and runningback with the names of Moses, Magic, Dr. J – Julius Erving, Bird, and #33, Kareem Abdul Jabbarwhose name means Noble one, servant of the Almighty. Augur of energy and culture and almost unbearablepresence, he sings at the shadow play of hurt and healing, in the theater of race and sex, mercy and moneywhere absurdly vertical male figures are standing at a certain angle to violence and women and the worldexecuting the killer crossover, sneakers squealing from child labor. It’s basketball, Jack. It’s art under halogenlights with hate and humorlessness removed. Marvin sings “ramparts” with sincerity and irony as if he were keepingwatch on the battlements for Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Who’s there? he asks in a double-breasted suitand mirrored shades and pocket silk. He removes [End Page 666] one stone from apartheid. He sings and it’s treason.It’s Reagan. It’s strategic marketing. It’s miscegenation. It’s cocaine chopped and snorted off a mirror reflectingthe dilated decade. He takes the British drinking song of bonhomie and puts it through a war and the forgetting.He sings so far behind the beat it’s as if he’s remembering the beatings, the burden, the chitlin circuit, askingis it more or less beautiful now and was it the singing? [End Page 667] Bruce Smith bruce smith is the author of several books of poems, including The Other Lover, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A “Discovery”/The Nation Award winner, Smith has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants from the NEA and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology. Smith was a coeditor of the Graham House Review and a contributing editor of Born Magazine. He taught at the University of Alabama and Syracuse University. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963 by J. F. Powers

Reviewed by: Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963 by J. F. Powers Jon Schaff J. F. Powers, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Edited by Katherine A. Powers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013. 450 pp. $35.00. Some time ago I was in a major bookstore in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota, looking for Morte D’Urban by J. F. Powers (1917–99). Not only was I told that they did not have the book, but was further (rudely) told that the bookstore did not have a regional author section and never had. This lack of [End Page 130] acknowledgement seems to be indicative of much of J. F. Powers’s life experience. Part of that experience is now captured in Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. This collection of letters, edited by Katherine A. Powers, J. F. Powers’s daughter, gives a window into the heart of a writer struggling to produce art while oppressed by financial and familial obligations. The collection also demonstrates Powers’s wry sense of humor that infects his fiction. Powers, born in Illinois, spent most of his adult life in Minnesota, mostly around St. Paul and St. Cloud. One of the themes of the book, though, is Powers’s inability to settle into any home, to find “suitable accommodations,” bouncing from home to home, even spending time overseas in Ireland, trying to make his way as a writer. As Katherine Powers notes in the introduction, Powers and his wife would move over twenty times in the course of their marriage. The book takes the reader through major events in roughly the first half of Powers’s life: his early imprisonment for refusal to serve in World War II; his courting and marriage to his wife Betty; the publication of his first set of short stories; the birth of various children; and culminating with the success of Morte D’Urban, his first novel (of only two), which won the National Book Award in 1963. Various themes arise out of Powers’s letters. One is Powers’s extraordinary ability to avoid paying work. Powers would couch this as a kind of virtue, speaking of “cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness” without losing himself “in a corporation.” Powers, while consistently complaining about lack of money, turned down multiple offers for editorships, teaching jobs, and speaking engagements. While moving his family from dingy home to dingy home, Powers struggled to complete his stories and avoided what he thought menial work that might pay the bills. One also gleans from Powers’ letters the trials of the artist. In Powers’s letters, and some choice selections from wife Betty’s journals, one senses that Powers had a deep sense of his artistic talent and his frustration that the trials of life (money, houses, cars, family) so often distracted him delving as deeply into that artistic vision as he’d have liked. Powers expresses deep frustration that artists less talented than he prospered, while he, thanks to his own lack of diligence and some extraordinary bad luck, continued to struggle financially while gaining considerable critical success. Together these themes of poverty and lack of publishing success often make Suitable Accommodations a gripping yet sorrowful read. [End Page 131] Powers would eventually take up a job at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, teaching creative writing. In my memory as a student there in the early 1990s Powers did not have a high profile on campus. At that time discussion of John Hassler, then writer-in-residence, was much higher. Granted, as a government major I did not run across Powers in class, although I have no recollection of English major friends speaking of him nor, when I did take an advanced writing course, was it from Powers. Powers seems to lack the genius or the tenacity for self-promotion that, it must be said, is part of building a literary reputation. While Hassler’s books were fairly widely read by students, including me, it was not until...

“DUMB COOZES” AND DAMAGED MEN: FEMALE STEREOTYPES, MALE VICTIMIZATION, AND MANIPULATIVE NARRATION IN THE THINGS THEY CARRIED AND IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS

have done bad things for love, bad things to stay loved. Kate is one case. Vietnam is another (Tim O'Brien, Vietnam in Me).It was the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved (O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods).Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in (John Wade, In the Lake of the Woods).Many critics of Vietnam War literature have long examined the variables of male bonding in a combat zone and the subsequent sexual perversion that resulted from losing one's identity in a group superficially connected by the more macabre aspects of war. However, very little interest has been garnered regarding the residual misogynistic impulses that carried over to American women after the vets returned home. Author of multiple essays, short stories, and prizewinning novels on the Vietnam War (including, most notably, Going After Cacciato, recipient of the National Book Award), O'Brien has frequently been tagged as the voice of the Vietnam soldier. Obsessed with truth, O'Brien has painstakingly crafted a unique type of storytelling, one that admittedly embellishes to convey the realness of his actual war experience - with the realness allegedly found specifically in the fabrication. During his career O'Brien has repeatedly defended the intermingling of fact and fiction that makes his works undoubtedly his. In his article, O'Brien's 'True Lies'? Tobey C. Herzog uses the release of In the Lake of the Woods as an opportunity to once again examine the role of O'Brien's real life in his fictional texts. While he concedes that fiction writers are literary liars because is funda mental to their art, he notes that O'Brien stands apart from his peers due to the fact that unlike many writers, [he] draws an inordinate amount of attention to this authorial deceit in a very self-reflexive manner, and his deception is often personal (895). After considering various possibilities, Herzog theorizes that maybe vanity drives O'Brien's need to plant himself into his fiction: Is it conceivable that a writer would consciously deflect attention away from his work onto himself in order to massage the ego, attract reviewers' attention, or sell books? (912).While ego goes a long way to explain how Tim finds his way into many short stories and novel chapters, it does not fully explain the very true ways O'Brien (the narrator and/or seems to resent the girls that and his buddies pine for back home. Among all the Vietnam War writers, O'Brien's works most often emphasize soldiers' destructive feelings towards American, rather than Vietnamese, women, both during and after their combat tour. In fact, O'Brien's novels are curiously devoid of sexual assault, even when in a book as graphic as In the Lake of the Woods he records everything John Wade sees during the infamous My Lai massacre. Instead of showing his protagonist sodomizing village girls or VC soldiers, O'Brien reveals his cha ra cter 's over whel mi ng anxieties about his Amer ica n gir lfr iend, a nd suggests that not only are his insecurities valid and legitimate - rather than created or embellished - but that they also push the soldier to his breaking point rendering the woman who prompted his anguish liable for his actions: even for ones many years after his war.Indeed, with the release and subsequent adulation of Lake in 1994, O'Brien's treatment of his female characters - coupled with the knowledge that O'Brien writes himself int o his novels - deserves more attention than previously bestowed. Once regarded with scorn and obsessed over from afar by soldiers in his other novels, doubly reduced to a dumb cooze via a frustrated Rat Kiley and equally aggravated O'Brien (the character) in The Things They Carried, the unsympathetic female in Lake is suddenly and brutally murdered by her traumatized veteran, with whom we are subtly yet distinctly encouraged to sympathize and render blameless. …

Jeannette Armstrong's <em>Slash</em> and the Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature

Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and the Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult Literature Mandy Suhr-Sytsma (bio) In November 2007 Sherman Alexie won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This event might have prompted scholars to attend to other Indigenous-authored young adult (ya) texts and to examine the possibilities of the ya genre for Indigenous writers. Yet, several years after True Diary’s debut, this area of scholarship remains scant. In fact, there are currently few articles and no book-length studies exclusively devoted to Indigenous-authored ya literature. Scholars, moreover, have not yet substantially explored questions about what Indigenous authors have to off er to the ya genre or what the genre has to off er to Indigenous literature. This essay, along with the larger project from which it is drawn, begins remedying these oversights. My work builds on that of Doris Seale, Beverly Slapin, Paulette Molin, Clare Bradford, and Debbie Reese. These scholars provide broad analytical surveys of texts by both non-Indigenous and Indigenous authors who represent Indigenous characters in books for young readers.1 By critiquing stereotypes and colonialist perspectives in texts by non-Native writers—including award-winning texts commonly integrated into school curricula—and by promoting texts that offer accurate nuanced representations of Native people, these scholars make crucial contributions for K–12 education and popular culture, as well as for Children’s/ya literary studies. By focusing exclusively on Native-authored young adult texts and theorizing their unique approach to Native sovereignty and to the ya genre, I aim to move this area of study into a more fully realized subfield of both Indigenous studies and children’s/ya literary studies. [End Page 25] reading slash as ya Much ink has been spilled in debates over the definition of young adult literature. The American Library Association (ala) defines “adolescent literature” as encompassing three categories, which Sheila Schwartz summarizes as “Books Written Specifically for Adolescents,” “Books Written for General Trade Market Which Have Adolescent Heroes and Heroines,” and “General Books of Interest to Young Adults” (Schwartz qtd. in Trites, Disturbing 7). While recognizing that other scholars use the ya label for texts that match any of the ala’s criteria for adolescent literature, Roberta Trites, a leading scholar in the field, limits the young adult literature designation to texts specifically targeting adolescents (Disturbing 7; “Introduction” 2–3). As Trites explains in her landmark study Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, literary historians mark the emergence of ya literature as a distinctive genre in the mid-twentieth century: in 1942 with the publication of Seventeenth Summer, in 1951 with The Catcher in the Rye, and in 1967 with The Outsiders (9). While Trites and other critics recognize the market-driven subjective nature of the ya label—and, to a certain extent, the category of “adolescence” itself—they also identify common characteristics of texts in the genre: these works tend to represent the latest speech patterns and consumer trends, they inevitably face censorship as a result of portraying realistic adolescent behavior, and they focus on young characters who rebel and mature as they come of age (Hunt 5–6; Trites, Disturbing 9–20). Trites makes an influential case in Disturbing the Universe that “Young Adult literature has exploded as an institution in the postmodern era because although it affirms modernity’s belief in the power of the individual … it very self-consciously problematizes the relationship of the individual to the institutions that construct her or his subjectivity” (20). ya novels thus stand apart from both adult and children’s texts, Trites argues, through their emphasis on power negotiations between individuals and social institutions even more so than through their focus on adolescent growth (Disturbing 20). Earlier Indigenous writers—from E. Pauline Johnson and Charles Alexander (Ohiyesa) Eastman to D’Arcy McNickle and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneeve—certainly published texts that appealed to young adults, but Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 Slash was the first novel by an American Indian or Canadian Aboriginal author written [End Page 26] expressly for a teen readership and thereby falling under Trites...

Guilty (Country) Secrets: Maria Beig’s Hermine: An Animal Life

Guilty (Country) SecretsMaria Beig’s Hermine: An Animal Life Matthew Neill Null (bio) Maria Beig, still living at ninety-six, is the startling chronicler of life in Swabia, a rural, Catholic region of southern Germany, a place of farms and rolling hills, of country fatalism and sublimated dreams. Her books capture the precariousness of women’s lives in that place. She maps their astonishing emotional territory but never resorts to sentimentality, detailing their interactions with priests and philanderers, scolding relatives and suspicious friends, stationed soldiers and half-hearted suitors. Without the labor of the National Book Award–winning novelist Jaimy Gordon and the German academic Peter Blickle, Beig’s work would be inaccessible to American readers. Twenty years after its German debut, Hermine: An Animal Life was published in 2004 by New Issues Poetry & Prose, in Gordon’s English translation. Here, Gordon and Blickle (Gordon’s husband and an authority on Beig) have selected six brief chapters to represent the novel, which recounts the life of Hermine, the misfit of a large farming family—perpetually underfoot, clumsy, on the edge of things, a problem to be solved or skirted. I don’t want to give much away, but I should say that Hermine is a bestiary of sixty-four animals; each chapter is characterized by her interaction with a different animal in that landscape, as she grows from infancy to childhood to married life as a school teacher. It is rare to encounter such a work of contemporary fiction that gives animal life its due. [End Page 150] I continue to be struck by Maria Beig’s bracing candor, her unwillingness to soften the essential brutality of life among people. I hope these chapters give a taste of this. Readers, if moved, should also seek out her amazing novel Lost Weddings, about four unmarried women who navigate a conservative culture where family, tradition, and mores are sacrosanct—all of which they are destined to disappoint, merely by continuing to exist. Last August, Gordon and I began our conversation about this Reclamation piece on a dying cellphone—I called her from Sistersville, West Virginia, one of Gordon’s favorite towns, where I was hiding out from a wandering cloud that could have killed me and my child. My own town had been evacuated when a rail-car carrying thirty thousand gallons of liquid chlorine cracked open and the chlorine turned to toxic gas. So I drove down the Ohio River to wait, listen to the police scanner, and see where the blue cloud moved. (Shades of Don DeLillo, another favorite of Gordon’s.) I reached Gordon at her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she was watching a horse race—anyone who’s read her work will know her abiding love for horses and track life. Hearing about the chlorine spill stunned her, as it wasn’t really picked up by national news. She was sure she wanted to include the “Mosquitoes” chapter from Hermine, as she had improved her translation since 2004, with new knowledge of the soldier’s nursery rhyme. She and Blickle would choose the rest together. The next day, I drove around to see where the chlorine left brown trees and dead gardens behind. That stretch of West Virginia was a fitting place to discuss Beig—a still-rural landscape with tentative patches of industrialization. Axiall, the chlorine plant, known in my youth as PPG, stands on the Ohio River between Sistersville and Moundsville—the latter the setting for Indian Mound Downs, the fictional racetrack featured in Gordon’s fabulous novel Lord of Misrule. Free trade and outsourcing have fallen like a hatchet on this place; the people continue to live in the wound. My great-grandfather represented the above-mentioned towns in the state senate, and nearly all of my high school classmates had parents who worked at the chlorine plant, a strike-hardened factory of union workers who had good homes and pensions and sent their children to college—a disappearing American life. Yet once you leave the river valley, you’re in ridges among second-and third-growth forests, country graveyards, trailer homes, modest churches, and farms dotted with Charolais cattle. If I squint...

“The Handling of Power”: An Interview with Nancy Farmer

“The Handling of Power”: An Interview with Nancy Farmer Marek Oziewicz (bio), Emily Midkiff (bio), Nancy Farmer, and Harold Farmer Nancy Farmer lives in a weird and wonderful land between imagination and reality. She has a chilling knack for excavating magical beliefs whose purported death has been exaggerated and for anticipating technological transformations whose impact on humanity is often unduly dreaded. Best known for her National Book Award winner The House of the Scorpion (2002), Nancy is the author of several other works, among them Newbery Honor Books The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (1994), A Girl Named Disaster (1996), and a widely popular mythopoeic fantasy series The Saxon Saga (2004–7). Nancy’s most recent books include The Lord of Opium (2013), a long-awaited sequel to The House of the Scorpion, and A New Year’s Tale (2013): a delightfully unclassifiable dystopian biofiction based on the character of Nancy’s brother. Set in the context of the near-future collapse of the social security system, A New Year’s Tale is full of poetic beauty matched by razor-sharp extrapolation from current trends to possible future outcomes. Whether set in the past or the future, her novels are informed by a nuanced understanding of cultural difference, love of the natural world, and interest in advanced technologies. Nancy’s science habits, clearly at work in her writing, result in books that are meticulously researched and profoundly engaging. Before she became a writer, Nancy studied chemistry at University of California Berkeley and worked for the Entomology Department. She then spent seventeen years in Africa, first working to control waterweeds on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, and then doing research on tsetse flies in the dense bush of Zimbabwe. It was in Zimbabwe that Nancy fell [End Page 100] in love with African stories and culture. She also fell in love and married Harold Farmer, a Namibian-born writer and professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe. When they returned to the United States in 1988, Nancy worked in the genetics department at Stanford, but was unable to stifle the writer within. On the day she quit her job, Nancy received a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts awarding her a grant that would help her become a full-time writer. She has never looked back. The following conversation with Nancy and Harold Farmer was recorded on October 6, 2014 at the University of Minnesota. MO: To anyone reading your African novels it is striking how your stories are structured on African spiritual beliefs in ancestors and ghosts, invisible powers and worlds, and spiritual entities like the Njuzu, Ngangas, or Mvukis. Can you tell us what specifically captured your heart in African spirituality and why this worldview informs so many of your novels? NF: I lived in Africa a long time, seventeen years. I would say for the first ten years I didn’t pick up very much. It was all around me, but I didn’t know what I was looking at. For example, I was working on Lake Cahora Bassa, controlling waterweeds, and one of my coworkers was a man called Mulazani. He would have witch doctors visiting him all the time because he apparently had many enemies and so he hired the witch doctors to do something or other to these people. I saw all this going on but I didn’t really understand it. Mulazani also told me a lot about African religion, but again I didn’t know what I was listening to. It’s a complicated system. Only later on, when I moved to Zimbabwe and wanted to write a story about Africa that would be intelligible to American readers, did I realize that I should learn something. So I sat down and I got about four hundred different books to pick up as much as I could as to what the religion really was. I discovered that it’s not a mythology but really a living religion. So when I did the African stories, I immersed myself in it. One of the first things you realize is that African spirituality is based in the spirit world of the ancestors. The...

The Historical World of Peter Gay

Peter Gay, an American historian, died in May 2015. The aim of this paper is to eulogize his life as well as to shed some light on the works authored by him. His books include The enlightenment: An Interpretation, winner of the National Book Award in 1967, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, a perennial bestseller, and The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, multi-volume analysis of the bourgeoisie of the Victorian Age. As a non-religious Jew trapped in a Germanic culture, Peter Gay had a strong bond with Freud, who was in the same kind of predicament in an Austrian setting. That may explain why Gay had a special interest in Freud, and why he used Freudian scheme in his depiction of historical scenes. Not only as a historian but also as a critic of modern art, Gay left an un-ignorable imprint on the students of history and the reading public. As a person deeply grateful for the form and contents of his writings, I pray for him. May rest in peace, my mentor.

Fiction and Anger

Fiction and Anger Larry Fondation (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution I write about poor people—petty thieves, working stiffs, the homeless—ordinary, everyday poor people. A few years ago, Sean Bernard pointed out, in a review of one of my books in these pages, that my work was not about the homeless who attended Juilliard, nor about poor people with Tourette’s, but rather about regular, run-of-the-mill poor people. In contemporary fiction, there are very few books about the poor. Myriad reasons account for this lacuna: changes to the publishing industry, lack of interest/lack of sales, a different political milieu. Undeniably, the nation has moved rightward. Nixon was a more progressive President than Obama. Writers now need MFAs to get published. These largely irrelevant degrees cost a hundred grand. We now have many Henry James’s, very few Floyd Dell’s, or Tom Kromer’s. Nor do we have a neo-Nelson Algren—train-hopping hobo and Simone de Beauvoir’s lover—the epitome of the working class intellectual. My line of thinking here owes a debt not only to Sean Bernard, but also to Eric Miles Williamson, whose book Oakland, Jack London and Me (2007) is the best work I know about impoverished writers writing about their own. Back in the day, Algren was lionized, and then vilified. He wrote about the working class during the McCarthy era, and was spied upon and ostracized. His characters were considered “colorful”—the wild side of New Orleans and junkie card dealers in Chicago. These folks were the casualties of the failure of the American Dream in the aftermath of World War II. In 1949, Algren won the first National Book Award; a few years later, he was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 2015, we simply ignore such writers and writing—as we do the poor. Stephen Gutierrez is a good writer. He writes about the poor. Not Poles and Italians like Algren, but Mexicans, Chicanos, in Fresno and Los Angeles. In Gutierrez’s story, “The Big Fresno Fair” (2010), a nice Latino family attends the County fair. They play carnival games and eat cotton candy. When the tough guys show up—tatted up vatos, well-coifed Morrissey fans, cussing their heads off—the family folks exit in fear. The poor are afraid of the poor. Not the cops, not anti-Communist witch hunters, but rather their own alter egos—their own children, in fact. And that’s how it is now—rather than get angry, they fear anger, and then turn in rage on their own. Just the way the powerful want it to be. In another Gutierrez story, called “The Mexican Man in His Backyard” and subtitled “A Fable of Sorts” (2014), an educated (presumably Chicano) husband and father takes an interest in his neighbors—a Native American and “a Mexican.” After a dinner “of sorts,” the educated man returns home to his wife, excited about his multicultural new barrio. A traffic accident occurs. The “Mexican Man” helps with translation. Afterwards, “the Mexican man went back into his house.…He continued to ignore me. He didn’t care.” That’s the last line—“he didn’t care.” The Ancient Greeks used the word “idiot,” not to depict the mental capacity of a person, but rather to describe a “private person,” lacking a public life—a citizen who did not participate in politics. Picking up on Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), writes about the need for both a robust private life and a vigorous public life. We live in times where the latter is lacking, particularly among the poor. As Gutierrez writes: “He didn’t care.” In the 1990s, Kurt Cobain sang: “Here we are now, entertain us!” The powers that be sure heard the call: Dish TV, Facebook, soap operas, sports, 500 channels, Instagram, Twitter, selfies galore. During his early career, Nelson Algren wrote in a public space that was a place of and for radical politics. Algren, Richard Wright, William Saroyan and many others were members of the left-leaning John Reed Club. Algren’s biographer, Bettina...

LANDLESSNESS, WAR, AND DISPLACEMENT IN LITERATURES OF MINDANAO AND SULU

About the Author Allan Popa is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Drone (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013) and Laan (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2013). He has received the Philippines Free Press Literary Award and the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award. He earned his MFA in Writing (Poetry) at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he won the Norma Lowry Prize and the Academy of American Poets Graduate Prize. He received fellowships to the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College from 2006 to 2011. He teaches at the Filipino Department of Ateneo de Manila University and is currently the Director of Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices (AILAP). He is pursuing doctoral studies at De La Salle University-Manila. DEPOSITION FROM THE CROSS AND OTHER POEMS

Transformation and Engagement: An Interview with H.L. Hix

An interview with author, editor, academic and philosopher H.L. Hix discussing such topics as philosophy and poetry, interdisciplinary engagement, pedagogy, writing processes and rules, humane teaching, neoliberalism, human capital, mediation, collage, remix, appropriation, curating, dialogue, and writing practice.H.L. Hix is Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wyoming. His 25+ books include works of philosophy (studies of ‘the death of the author’ and postmodernism), practical criticism (monographs on writers William Gass and W.S. Merwin), translation (such as his collaborative translation, with Jüri Talvet, of the poems of the Estonian peasant poet Juhan Liiv), anthologies (such as the recent Ley Lines), essays on poetry (including Lines of Inquiry), and poetry (including a ‘selected poems’, First Fire, Then Birds). His Chromatic was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and been a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Yonsei University.

William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion ed. by Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes (review)

Coffman, Christopher K., and Daniel Lukes, eds. 2015. William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion. Newark: University of Delaware Press. $90.00 hc. xvi + 366 pp.In the preface William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, Larry McCaffery outlines the between Vollmann's literar y aestheticism and his the grim, often horrific social and political realities he continually returns to (xiv). This dichotomy is highlighted frequently throughout the volume, but there are those who concede that on occasion the writer's attention the latter can outweigh his devotion the former: book by Vollmann may feel more like a collection of notes toward study rather than the study itself (272), as one of the contributors admits of Kissing the Mask (2007). One of the reasons for this is Vollmann's immense output, which runs roughly book year since the early 1990s, several of which are over thousand pages long. These factors go long way explaining why, despite Europe Central (2005) winning the National Book Award, public acknowledgement of Vollmann's work remains muted, and little critical attention has been devoted it. As the first significant volume on the author, A Critical Companion is landmark in Vollmann scholarship.As much as the sheer volume of writing that Vollmann produces, it is the range of subject matter in his corpus that startles: historical fiction, sociological surveys, entomological allegories, and artist books constitute just sampling of the kinds of texts which Vollmann has turned his hand. Such range ensures that the twenty-five pieces offered in this companion are themselves varied and generally absorbing. The editors have organized this material under four thematic headings: Engaging People, Space, and Place; Engaging Narratives: History, Historiography, Ethics; Sex, and Politics; and Methods and Mores: Texts, Paratexts, Aesthetics. Inevitably, these categories are loose and there is overlap between essays and some repetition; however, the framework allows Vollmann's major thematic concerns be brought the fore. So, the first essay, by Aaron D. Chandler on Poor People (2007), immediately highlights what is, my mind, the major engagement of Vollmann's career: empathy. The essays here suggest that serves as both means and end for Vollmann, who, as Georg Bauer writes, is concerned encounter the people he wants learn from as honestly as possible as way take closer look at the Other (74-75). It is instructive note that while Bauer is commenting on Vollmann's sociological work, Miles Liebtag reaches similar conclusion in his postcolonial reading of Vollmann's first published novel You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), which he argues extols engagement with subaltern reality not as means epistemic mastery, but as means greater empathy (196). Both Michael K. Walonen, who reads Imperial (2009) dialogically with Harold Bell Wright's 1911 novel The Winning of Barbara Worth, and Joshua C. Jensen in his essay on Paradigms of Power, demonstrate that Vollmann's should not be tacitly equated with sentimentalism.The need develop nuanced understanding of the nature of Vollmann's relationship with his subject is imperative when it comes considering Vollmann's engagement with the sex industry. Former sex worker Melissa Petro lauds Vollmann's writings because they clearly acknowledge multiple perspectives and plural industries-not falling into the trap of inadvertently re-enforcing the notion that sex workers are either empowered or oppressed, point backed up by Daniel Lukes's observation that Vollmann recognizes that our moral and ideological frameworks are seldom enough through which see the world (245; 250). …