A Mercy (Vintage International)

by Toni Morrison

ToB: A Mercy vs. City of Refuge

A review by Tournament of Books

First a little background on the tournament -- from The Morning News:

Each spring we take 16 celebrated novels from the previous year and seed them into a competitive bracket like the kind used in the NCAA basketball championship. (If you're into that kind of thing, read more here.) A group of judges is enlisted, and the tournament plays out over the course of five rounds of matches in March. Each match sees two books battling head-to-head in brutal combat, with a judge explaining how he or she has chosen to move one of them to the next round.

Along the way, we ask our judges to lay bare their publishing affiliations and literary prejudices -- to clear the cigar smoke left behind by the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize committees.

Finally, we declare one work of fiction to be the Champion Book of the Year, and we award/threaten its author with a live, angry rooster, the official Tournament of Books mascot, named after our favorite character in contemporary literature, David Sedaris's brother.

From the Judge's Booth (judged by all judges + Amanda Hesser):

Amanda Hesser:
I was surprised by the number of parallels between Tom Piazza's City of Refuge and Toni Morrison's A Mercy. The biblical themes -- floods and slavery. The characters' resulting feelings of dislocation. The narrative being carried forward from the perspective of a handful of characters. Were Morrison and Piazza at Yaddo together? Probably not, but the darkness of their narratives feels appropriate right now.

Morrison's book, which is so short it feels more like a novel in haiku, explores the lives of a trader, his wife, and their slaves in the 17th century. In a land not yet shaped by law, each character is deeply dependent on the others for survival, and yet each seems unable to alter his or her doomed trajectory. Not a lot happens in the book; it is a forge for internal revelation, as the characters ceaselessly meditate on a small number of events -- a mother's decision to give up her daughter to the trader, a slave's journey to get medical help for the trader's wife. Morrison's people ultimately emerge as fragile and limited, unable to overcome being abandoned.

In her past works, such as Beloved, I've been mystified by Morrison's prose style, which seems to blow fog in your face, and then demand that you push through it to figure out what's happening. She doesn't make you work quite as hard in A Mercy -- a mercy, indeed.

Piazza tackles an equally massive and thorny topic: Hurricane Katrina. Trying to recreate the drama of an event many of us feel (rightly or wrongly) that we lived through on television and in the newspapers is a big challenge; we already think we know the story, and how it turns out. Piazza overcomes this obstacle by zeroing in on the experiences of two families: Craig and Alice, an upper-middle-class white couple living in a white neighborhood on the west side of New Orleans, and the black Vietnam War vet S.J., his sister, Lucy, and her son, Wesley, who live in the Lower Ninth Ward. Piazza explores the paths they take when they're uprooted by Katrina, and the wrenching process of their decisions of whether to ultimately try to return to the greatly diminished city.

The characters are a mixed lot -- the struggling black family resonates more than the whiny white yuppies, and sometimes they all feel like a little like coat hooks for Piazza to hang his exodus narrative on. But he is convincingly furious about the folly and neglect that led to the flood and the floating dead. By accretion of detail, by lovingly describing the bars and krewes and daily errands of New Orleans's citizens, he creates a portrait of a vital -- or once-vital -- city, and how deracinated its people feel when they're forced to leave. There are larger resonances with many of the great catastrophes and diasporas that constitute modern history.

While neither is a perfect novel, they're both engaging and thought-provoking books. But everyone knows Morrison's work; fewer are familiar with Piazza's. And so for this final round, I'm giving my nod to the promising underdog.
Point: City of Refuge

Andrew Womack:
I began Piazza's novel with a rush, and was swept up in its dual stories -- until 100 pages in. That's when tiny faults began to appear: The characters flattened, reducing to their foibles. Steadily, the novel's plot appeared foregone. Then Piazza dug it out, and I was cheering on each character until I became elated -- and crushed -- through the book's many unexpected conclusions. Morrison's storytelling power brought her to the finals, yet the power of City of Refuge wins my nod for the Rooster.
Point: City of Refuge

Rosecrans Baldwin:
No one like Morrison makes me feel as though I've picked up a new Faulkner novel; after a couple of dry years, I'm so glad a new book of hers gave me that feeling again. I enjoyed City of Refuge, but A Mercy is stupendous and I was sorry to see it end.
Point: A Mercy

Junot Diaz:
Some very surprising decisions through out the competition -- 2666 somehow got bounced and another favorite of mine died, too. But this ain't math, folks. And here we are with two fantastic books. If it were up to me, I'd call it a tie and let it be. But since it ain't up to me, between these two finalists, I'm going with Morrison. I love this book, this writer, and Piazza's novel is superb (this cat is a dynamo), but it couldn't in the end wrest me away from A Mercy. In boxing when it's a tie they always give it to the champ and that's what I did. But City of Refuge took Morrison to the brink, and how many books how many writers can make that claim? Bravo, sir.
Point: A Mercy

Powells.com's Brockman:
Frankly, I'm baffled by all the ToB love shown to City of Refuge. Yes, the book gets interesting when Hurricane Katrina hits, but countless documentaries and nonfiction books have given us real stories that were far more compelling. Piazza's bland characters are riddled with clichés and cultural stereotypes, and his "authentic" African-American dialogue veers uncomfortably close to Ebonics. I wish Richard Price had written it instead. Meanwhile, A Mercy is a stirring and haunting novel whose depth belies its brevity.
Point: A Mercy

Winner: A Mercy

Click here for more judges' commentaries.

Tune in next week for battle results and more ToB match-ups.

Round 1 contenders:

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It's that time of year again for the Tournament of Books, the annual NCAA-style battle between literary titans from online magazine The Morning News. You can print a bracket, keep track of the standings, and read all of the judges' reviews at TMN's website. You'll save 30% on all the tourney books when you purchase them from Powells.com. May the best book win!

Smile

by Raina Telgemeier

The Unforgettable Tooth

A review by Chris Bolton

Raina Telgemeier's Smile is a graphic novel for kids based on Telgemeier's real experiences in sixth grade when an accident knocked out one of her front teeth and pushed the other all the way into her gums. If that makes the book sound horrifying, you only have part of the picture.

Telgemeier turns her toothy memoir into a snapshot of her adolescent years. As she deals with some fairly traumatic -- and often surprisingly funny -- dental drama, Raina experiences as much (if not more) anguish from two-faced friends, judgmental peers, annoying younger siblings, and (of course) boys.

Handsomely illustrated and cleverly written by Telgemeier, Smile is a simple, fast-paced, yet unforgettable story that will resonate with anyone who survived those tumultuous teen years. Younger readers will likely relate to Raina's tribulations at school and home, and those who are facing the dreaded braces will certainly feel grateful they didn't have to live through Raina's trauma.

What elevates the book to a higher level is the humanity Telgemeier brings to her work. Her art is sharp and beautiful, capturing the rollicking sensation of those formative years, where a single day can start horribly and somehow plummet even lower before suddenly rocketing to joyous heights. As a character, Raina is smart, headstrong, typically neurotic, and truly endearing. Smile isn't a penetrating memoir anywhere near the scale of Blankets or Fun Home, but readers of all ages will find its little tremors cause big aftershocks.

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The Third Reich at War: 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

Kinds of Killing: The Flourishing Evil of the Third Reich

A review by William H. Gass

In order to prepare private citizens for the military, a humiliating and painful bullying is generally prescribed. Its aim is to inculcate obedience and create callousness. Leaders must be resolute and heartless, prepared to send any enemy "to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly," as the Fuhrer demanded. Next a campaign of denigration of the chosen opponent is undertaken. This is designed to reduce the humanity of the enemy and to prepare a social web of support for behavior that is basically cruel, immoral, and normally disapproved. It strengthens every aspect of your plans if the society that you represent brings to the project a tradition of paternal domination and abuse, reaching from the family to the Kaiser and to its final station, God. Deep feelings of injury, inferiority, and large reserves of resentment -- the fresher the better -- are nearly essential. Any widespread unhappiness within your country can then be directed at the selected scapegoat by every available instrument of indoctrination and propaganda. If the enemy can be enticed to return fire, that will help solidify the nation's resolve. Since a saw's cut is painful either way it moves, the soldier knows that it is safer to risk death at the front rather than execution in the rear. A general sense of uneasiness helps, as if you knew someone were watching where you walked, reading your mail, and overhearing you talk. This atmosphere of anxiety can be sustained when the agents of power are pitiless. The master craftsmen of the Third Reich, whose state-of-war posture is so painstakingly studied in this superb but disheartening history of bad behavior, had set their sights upon Poland at the time the third and final volume of Richard Evans's masterwork begins, and had made all the necessary preparations I have just enumerated.

The novelty of the war that was beginning with the German attack in September 1939 -- aside from the journalistically popular concept of Blitzkrieg -- was its unusual aim: not the defeat of another army but the destruction of a population. From Germans already living in Poland the SS formed militias of men whose grievances toward the indigenous population reached murderous levels with astonishing ease, and bands of "red legs" of this sort, obeying only the orders of their hearts, began organized shooting parties. The size of the payback for alleged Polish atrocities was 4,247 on October 7; by November, in Klammer, 2,000 had been added; near Mniszek, 10,000 more Poles and Jews of every age and sex were shot at the edges of the gravel pits that were to serve as their graves; in a wood near Karlshof, 8,000 more were massacred. The cleansing continued, picking up speed as efficiencies improved. Finding so many murderers among ordinary people had not proved difficult. Moreover these unconscionable activities were not the result of a long harsh military campaign and disappointing losses but were available for use the moment the war began, with its immediate, immoderate, and overwhelming victories.

The German army, when it began to do its part, specialized in burning any village in which the least resistance was encountered. The SS, as well as the regular police, were initially disposed to carry out the murder of specific persons instead of the anonymous many, and to be singled out might be a victim's only victory. This slaughter was ameliorated (the word cannot be read without a grimace) when the authorities recognized that Germany had a serious need for workers, with so many men gone from their jobs and away for the war. Every available body was then rounded up and sent off as a labor replacement wherever one was needed in the Fatherland. The "recruitment" of foreign labor was a considerable preoccupation of German bureaucracy during the entire war and eventually included putting to work prisoners of war from both fronts. Many a Polish house was emptied or a village stripped of its population, so that looting and pillaging became a military habit, and the rape of women was implicitly encouraged by the army. The greed of many in the high command was as huge, and as frankly bragged of, as Falstaff's pride in his belly. Hitler wanted to establish a museum of stolen property in his hometown of Linz. Goring desired to display his art as he did his hunting trophies above the many sofas furnishing his numerous schlosses.

This Great War was not one war but many, fought in different places, under different circumstances, and at different times; but the German troops remembered to bring with them to new encounters the bad habits formed when they invaded Poland. Their behavior was still able to produce surprise. "Where is the traditional German sense of honour," wrote one inhabitant of occupied Athens. "They empty houses of whatever meets their eye. In Pistolakis' house they took the pillow-slips and grabbed the Cretan heirlooms from the valuable collection they have. From the poor houses in the area they seized sheets and blankets. From other neighborhoods they grab oil paintings and even the metal knobs from the doors." Of course, the pillowcases became bags for bearing off heirlooms, and the knobs, if metal, were needed back home. Looting was rarely random among the officer class.

Like a monstrous babe born from the brow of Rabelais, this war was only a few months old and already it had become a major crime against humanity. The German government, noticing that too much booty was escaping the clutches of the State, simply announced in September of 1939 that it had acquired for its own use the contents of the entire store. Acquisitions then began in earnest. The army took over farms and anything else that might supply food; universities lost their scientific instruments; every iron object, length of copper, or zinc downspout, steel girder, tin saucepan, and -- yes -- doorknob, was scooped up, melted down, and sent to work in the mills of the Reich. "Even the Warsaw Zoo's collection of stuffed animals was taken away." There appeared to be a bounty on Polish priests, who were deported, incarcerated, shot. Schools were closed and their equipment destroyed. Businesses were commandeered and landed estates requisitioned. As the winter grew harsh, the German police borrowed the Poles' sheepskin coats if they saw a serviceable one pass in the street. In town after town, the names of the avenues and alleyways were replaced. In sum, everything Polish was banned, burned, stolen, eaten, removed, imprisoned, or deported, and sooner or later entire populations were slaughtered far more carelessly than cattle.

With acres of their fields burned, crops requisitioned, and farmers enslaved, the population began to starve. Rations, if you were a Pole, came to no more than 669 calories a day. Jews received 184. An officer's spit might contain that much. Robbers roamed the roads and forests. Diseases spread as the body's resistance failed. In France, when Germany overran it, refugees fled one city only to fill another. Friends turned upon friends. Denunciation replaced "bonjour." So the campaign of extermination was going nicely. Thin women were the only ones around but nonetheless inviting, exchanging syphilis for a few hundred calories of love.

On the eastern edges of Poland, where the Russians were employing very similar methods of murder and deportation, conditions, though sometimes different, were no better, and the killing contest, at an admittedly rough count, continued to turn out a draw. Jews scarcely knew which way to run nor dared they stay in place, since anti-Semitism was, in Poland (as it was in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine), a flourishing native plant. Evans is succinct: "The deliberate reduction of Poland to a state of nature, the boundless exploitation of its resources, the radical degradation of everyday life, the arbitrary exercise of unfettered power, the violent expulsion of Poles from their homes -- all of this opened the way to the application of unbridled terror against Poland's Jews."

There are several strategies one might employ for lessening the guilt of the Germans without denying the fact of their crimes. A number are currently operating in the guise of (fraudulent) memoirs or romanticizing movies. A few such were cited earlier this year by Jacob Heilbrunn in an article for the New York Times Heilbrunn remarks that "the further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it's being exploited to create a narrative of redemption." Recently, stories of German opposition to Nazi actions have become particularly popular. There is, however, little that is exotic or daring about the occasional leaflet campaigns the Social Democrats managed to set going as late as the summer of 1934. Evans, in his second volume, points out that "by this time, almost all the other leading Social Democrats who had remained in Germany were in prison, in a concentration camp, silenced or dead." Even those who would endeavor to kill Hitler were mostly motivated by their conviction that Germany was finally losing the war, rather than by any deep-seated objections to his policies. At least, that was the opinion the London Times found in its review of Germans Against Hitler by Hans Mommsen (2008) and Luck of the Devil (2009) by Ian Kershaw. Although one dead fly may ruin an entire porridge, an innocent olive will not render benevolent a poisoned glass.

Richard Evans is a veteran of these revisionist wars, having earned a few medals for his testimony against one of honesty's enemies, David Irving, who had the chutzpah to sue Deborah Lipstadt (a professor at Emory University) for libeling him in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993) -- a careful exposure of this movement's bowel-like (regular, hidden, contemptible) strategies. Evans's evidence has been presented in his own Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (2001). Irving lost his case, but these apologists are not easy to discourage. They lurk about the edges of conflicts like this, especially now that the Internet lends its facilities to any voice that cares to attach a pseudonymous name or academic title to a site from which they can fire off innuendos, profit from ignorance, and cast suspicion. Another excellent exposure of revisionist methods can be found in Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (1987). If there are any purely "intellectual crimes," denying the reality of the Holocaust is surely one of them.

Still, one excuse that I rather like is the presumption that any group of people, finding themselves in the same sort of situation, their histories stocked with similar resentments, would act in a comparably vengeful fashion. Suppose that I have been a pitiful powerless person my whole life, and the victim of war, humiliation, and economic collapse. Now, suddenly, finally, I carry your life in my holster, I can act with impunity and at whim, but I must remind the world of my elevation by repeated demonstrations, the more vulgar, petty, and disgusting the better. So after I have raped this Polish -- Tunisian -- Greek -- Gypsy girl, who certainly deserved it, I shall invent little sadistic extras to demand of her: that she clean the public latrines with her blouse. Jewish bystanders shall be required to doff their silly hats. Polish scum shall be made to lie flat in the mud and kiss dirt. While they are thus prone I shall try not to wobble when I walk upon one of them, but they are incorrigibly lumpy.

But it was the Romanian members of the Iron Guard who did the human race proud when they forced two hundred Jewish men into a slaughterhouse, flayed them from their clothes, and made them walk the line to their stockyard executions, after which their corpses were hung up on meat hooks that had been run through their throats. Those German "doctors," who looked upon the Jewish children in their hands very much as we do laboratory mice, yet wishing to erase any evidence of their experiments upon them, considerately shot the kids full of morphine and had them hung on hooks for SS men to yank as one has to tug when extricating clothes from a crowded closet.

"Croatian Ustashe units," perhaps out of friendly rivalry and to demonstrate that victims didn't have to be Jewish, "gouged out the eyes of Serbian men and cut off the women's breasts with penknives." They also carried out clever sting operations by promising amnesty to any villager who converted to Catholicism and then beating to death with spiked clubs the 250 who showed up at a Glina church for the conversion ceremony. At other times they just used ordinary hammers.

Richard Evans's three volumes of disagreeable details, masterfully ordered and presented with ruthless clarity, are not centrally concerned with actual fighting, although a good account can be found there. His indictment is principally based on the political and cultural climate that created a monster out of an apparently civilized nation-state. And it does not fail to quote from countless witnesses whose eyes had to shed -- like tears -- their disbelief of a barbarism for which only the human species could find the evil energies. Whether one must wear a yellow star . . . excuses are inadequate; whether one is banished from the queue for daily rations . . . excuses are inadequate; whether one is murdered in an unimaginably mean way . . . excuses are inadequate; whether that wretch whom I shot from a passing window turns out to be twenty or two thousand destined to crumple into open graves . . . excuses are inadequate; and if we feel rage . . . well . . . welcome to our ambiguous skin: victor hates victim for making him victorious.

Murder machines, such as those gas-driven engines of death that the Germans designed to facilitate their task, are the sort of thing that catches the popular imagination, but the quiet, at no point wholly observable, method of starvation is the ultimate choice: profitable while being cheap, and requiring no implements, no death chambers, no immediate executioners either. Disposing of the bodies when you have shot five hundred in the woods, or at the end of a week of inhalations when you have more corpses than you know how to discreetly burn, becomes an increasingly sensitive and annoying problem; so it is comforting to contemplate how economical starvation is, beginning with the victims feeding on themselves, thus reducing smoky fats, with a good chance they will finally fall upon those of their own who have fallen and endeavor to devour them. For sport, in a camp for captured Soviet soldiers, guards would bet on which dogs might leave upon their prisoners the most damaging tooth marks, but this was purely for entertainment and not very efficient for murder on a mass scale.

If you kill all the Jews, who will be left able to accuse you? Hardly anyone else will care and many will be quietly grateful.

The war against the Soviet Union began as felicitously as the invasion of Poland: many quick and easy victories, rapid advances, inconveniently large numbers of captive soldiers, much pillaging including the seasonal collection of winter coats, frequent rapes, pointless vandalism, random killings, and the gradual re-realization that prisoners might be better used as workers than as starvelings. To demonstrate who among the barbarous was Hun in Chief, the Nazis attacked fine homes and furnishings as if the mirrors were shooting back. Soldiers burned some of Tolstoy's manuscripts when they arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, and in Klin drove motorcycles back and forth over sheets of Tchaikovsky's musical scores. Mostly, though, soldiers complained of the miserable conditions of life that Russian villages offered them. "Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued." This inevitability, ironically, seems to have escaped the notice of present-day nations. What is the use of an upper hand if you can't spank someone with it?

One of the many shocks this book delivers is the reader's realization that -- after following a trail of murder and usurpation through two and one quarter volumes, during which death is more frequent than the words, cruelty and conflict more common than punctuation, murder spread equally over all their pages -- the killing is now going to begin in earnest. "There is also some evidence that Ukrainian nationalists in Lemberg nailed bodies to the prison wall, crucified them or amputated breasts and genitals to give the impression that the Soviet atrocities were even worse than they actually were." I'm glad they had a good reason. Despite the fact that some Ukrainians were mighty busy beating Jews with the poor man's arsenal -- clubs studded with nails -- the Nazis complained that their attempts "to incite pogroms against Jews have not met with the success we hoped for."

Entire cavalry brigades were now assigned the task of destroying Jews. One such group especially distinguished itself by shooting "more than 25,000 Jews in under a month." At first, the executioners were not to waste bullets on women but simply to drive them into the Pripet Marshes, the greatest area of swampy woodland in Europe, where they might drown; the marshes were only deep enough for wading, however, so the women, like the men, had to be shot. The Germans were not to be slowed by these setbacks. They found ravines, and in the one called Babi Yar, after undressing and lying down in neat rows -- victim upon the just victimized as blanket upon sheet -- the Jews were bulleted behind the neck to a total of 33,771.

Men cannot imagine such numbers. They can only perform them.

Any reluctance that was felt by members of the military was overcome by an anti-Semitism almost as old as their ages, by fears of reprisal for themselves, because of the shame they felt at being taken for sissies, and on account of the payments in plunder that fed their greed. "The great majority of officers and men took part willingly . . . and raised no objections." In some cases, Serbian prisoners would be used to collect from a fresh kill of Jews the contents of their pockets, and the soldiers would risk giving these people penknives to cut off ring fingers. A handy chart, of which Evans has many, shows by means of variously striped shades the numbers killed in the area stretching from Leningrad in the north to Vilna (248,468), from Minsk to Kursk (91,012), Kiev to Stalino (105,988), and Taganrog to Simferopol (91,678) during the years 1941-43. Only once more shall I give in to outrage and cite another particularly instructive moment among thousands that might be chosen, in order to draw your attention to Hans Kruger, head of the local security police in Stanislawow, Galicia, who threw a picnic for the shooters to enjoy between shootings and oversaw the massacre "with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a hot-dog in the other."

By the time the United States entered the war, the expansion of Germany's murderous ambitions had grown from one of forcible Polish relocation to pogroms that involved the whole eastern front, subsequently to the entire continent of Europe, and bore unmistakable signs, finally, of global aspirations. This would mean that the assimilated Jews of Germany, who had lost their homes and many possessions but otherwise had been "merely" harassed by a lengthening list that included petty bans on buying flowers or being forbidden to sit in deck chairs or rules denying them cats, would now be removed to camps in the east. The boxcars began their tryouts for grainy documentary movies. Between October of 1941 and February of 1942, fifty-eight trainloads of those "useless eaters," 53,000 Jews who were declared unfit for forced labor, were carried to numerous relocation sites.

Who could have imagined there were so many Jews; that just removing them to overnite ghettos in Poland or Ukraine would put such a strain upon every mile of track and every engine's boilers; that so many departments of government would be required, soldiers to shoot them, munitions to make, guards to control them, shovels to dig and to cover their graves? Better methods had to be found for both death and disposal. Perhaps those employed with such success in the programs of euthanasia might be brought into play -- sealed chambers and car exhaust -- and camps built solely for death's purpose. So thirty gas vans were built in Berlin. They could kill sixty at a time, an improvement of ten over previous model years. Occasionally a child survived whose mother had so severely swaddled it the fumes could not penetrate the cloth. It was a doubtful stroke of luck since the guards would smash such babies' heads against convenient trees.

Timing became important. Himmler had to bawl out one overzealous police chief in Riga who had a trainload of Berlin deportees killed too promptly, thus possibly alarming those Jews still in Berlin and causing them to be more difficult to handle. The range of extermination now clearly included the whole of occupied Europe. Yet it was the twentieth of January 1942 before the infamous Wannsee meeting on the final solution to the Jewish question took place.

The propaganda machine was making its own carbon monoxide. Everything the Germans were doing to the Jews the Jews had done to Germans, or would do if they could. They had started the war; they were eating away at the Reich's magnificent culture; they wanted to destroy Germany as it presently stood. Goebbels instructed the media to be unrelenting. "The Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame."

During the years 1941-43, Berlin Jews, who were not supposed to have their composure ruffled by hearing the worst of bad news, heard the bad news nevertheless and escaped by suicide. It was a wonder there were any trains left able to carry munitions. The idea that many people still didn't know what was going on represents another wild lie. If the Jews, who weren't supposed to know, knew, everybody did. Like the disciplined lines of white crosses at Arlington, numbers representing the sizes of the shipments march across Evans's text. Perhaps these pages more accurately resemble a schedule of departures than a cemetery, but their meanings are the same.

Until November of 1941, the extermination camps had not yet been built. A score of SS officers would run them; Ukrainians, taken from their own camps and given special training, would provide the raw manpower; and a few specialists recruited from the victims themselves (tailors, carpenters, cobblers, und so weiter) could supply the standard operative skills. All that otherwise might be needed, aside from the airtight gas chambers to create the corpses, earthen pits and crematoria to manage their disposal, were some houses for the SS and barracks for the auxiliary servants of the industry. These camps were extraordinarily efficient except that sometimes the wooden killing boxes began to leak and had to be replaced by concrete ones. At Belzec, the first of these specialized death camps, 75,000 Jews were gassed and their bodies burned in its initial thirty days of operation. Eventually, the number would approach 600,000.

The second camp was modeled after the first except the gas chambers were housed in a brick building. Hot weather, however, caused the corpses in the burial pits to swell and rise from the ground in small hills. This putrefaction began to contaminate the local water. A horrible smell was pervasive and seemed to beckon rats and other scavengers, so the SS filled a pit with wood and set it on fire, but bodies that are already all bones burn badly, even when placed on grills and turned now and then, as you might on a company cookout. Cremations continued to make problems, and scientific studies were undertaken to discover the most efficient methods of getting air to and around mounds of corpses so that the fire could breathe. As the Jews, naked, their possessions confiscated for auction in Berlin, were driven to the gas chambers at Treblinka, the third camp, by biting dogs and men with whips and iron bars, their wails of despair and screams from pain were alarming others, so the SS recruited a small orchestra to drown the hubbub by playing local hit tunes.

When, in April of 1943, Himmler ordered the camps closed and their presence erased, the job was almost done, although the task had become more difficult and on several occasions a few prisoners of war and a passel of Jews had broken out, killing several guards and embarrassing officials. The Germans covered some sites with shrubbery, trees, and flowers; this concealment remained rudimentary, but even the most inadequate erasures would give comfort later to those who denied the existence and/or operation of the gas chambers. By the summer of 1944 grave robbers had arrived, looking for the gold that might have been missed, only to turn up bones and rotting clothes.

Evans supplies very instructive details of the camps' procedures so that we may measure just how flourishing evil can become when provided with healthy circumstances. The novelty of Auschwitz was the use of a chemical pesticide called Zyklon-B, whose most active ingredient was sulphuric acid and whose lethal fumes were discovered by an accident that asphyxiated a cat. It was used in obedience to the following directions: "The men were herded into the room, the doors were sealed, then powdered Zyklon-B was shaken down through holes in the roof. The warmth generated by the bodies packed into the chamber below quickly turned it into a deadly gas."

Some camps were for show, like the back lots of movie studios, and were unable to make direct contributions to the killings, only mislead chosen visitors about them. In a few ghettos (Warsaw is the best known) there were uprisings as well as scattered signs of individual resistance by the Polish underground; but what slowed the German war on humanity (besides the Soviet army) was simply the size and consequent inefficiency of it. Evans ascribes the principal cause of the monstrous behavior required of its organizers to their "visceral hatred of Jews," but the word "visceral" tends to beg the question. How was anti-Semitism, so patently false in all its ages of activity, able to lodge itself in so many minds and thereafter weaken -- no, remove -- their moral character? How, in general, do people become slaves of foolish ideologies, support them with treasure, allegiance, and time, and act, at their behest, so vilely, so contrary to their own interest? History is full of absurdities masquerading as absolutes. Like whooping cough, beliefs get to children early, make their symptoms chronic, hold out useless hopes, and offer vain excuses. It is reason's business to disbelieve, but the voices of reason have as much effect here as frogs in a swamp.

This book has many themes that a reader might follow instead of the bloody course I've chosen, such as the struggles for power among the many Nazi administrators when any one of them was trying to obtain status, protect his perks, or strengthen his grip, during both sweet times and sour. Hitler repeatedly replaced one medal bearer with another and blamed them for trying to save their troops when the order was to die. Meantime, in the midst of a war that was not going well, there were other wars that developed a personality of their own the way Verdun did during World War I: such as the siege of Leningrad ("the city's inhabitants were starving, eating cats, dogs, rats and even each other"); the struggle for Stalingrad ("even those who were not hospitalized were sick, starving, frostbitten and exhausted"); or the Battle of Kursk ("the greatest land battle in history").

As all the wars that made up the Second World War began to go badly, so did the temperament of the German people and their enthusiasm for it. It could be observed that Party members no longer wore their Party badges. After the bombing of Hamburg, angry citizens who observed that symbol in the street might tear the insignia from the wearer's coat. The Germans could become audibly grouchy if the government cut their ration of bread, but not so much when it killed Jews. By this time in the concluding history of the Third Reich the numbers in the text no longer refer to murdered undesirables or captured soldiers but to bushels of imported wheat, the total of factory workers building airplanes, or the limit of calories allowed each citizen; and the narrative, always heavy with statistics, is likely to sink out of the view of the eye.

In the aftermaths of heavy and repeated bombing, dazed German citizens were forced to find places among the ruins of their cities to bury bodies wrapped in paper like parcels, since the cemeteries were full and incineration was not feasible. What could burn, had. The dead were hidden in mass graves amid household furnishings -- beds, jars, pots, clothing, carpets, cabinets -- strewn about in a tumble of plaster, bricks, and stones. The picture Evans paints contradicts the view, frequently held, that the bombings did not have any noticeable effect on the German people's will to fight. That will was weakening rapidly, as was that of the armed forces, increasingly beset on multiple fronts, misled by Hitler's intransigence, and compelled by the Soviets' superior numbers to retreat. Such cohesiveness as remained depended upon a continuing hatred of Jewry and Soviet Communism, loyalty to their comrades in arms, and a realistic awareness of the consequences of defeat; as well as a fear of their own officers, frantic to maintain discipline, who were fond of courts-martial, and the firing squads that shot 21,000 men as a result of the incredible 3 million trials ordered for numerous offenses. The Reich also began to lose allies -- Bulgaria first, then all of Italy, whose failures Germany was required to punish by corralling 650,000 Italian soldiers for chain-gang-style labor (50,000 eventually died in harness) and executing 6,000 on the occupied Greek island of Cephalonia who resisted.

As the German armies fell back they enjoyed the classic revenge of burning any hospital, handy town, field, or manor they encountered, as well as employing some of the lesser forms of vandalism: feasting in occupied homes, stealing bedding, toys, clothes, shoes, and relaxing after their larger exertions by trying on the owner's hats, smashing what would readily smash, and leaving toilets aswim with their stools. Jews were required to ransom themselves with gold. This could occasionally work. Members of the partisan resistance were sometimes shot in conveniently located catacombs, an admirable economy of means. The German troops did not fail to use geography as a weapon, flooding the Pontine marshes back to pre-Mussolini levels and reintroducing malarial mosquitoes that produced at least 98,000 cases for them in two years, not all deadly, although the Germans took the local quinine with them when they fled. Straight-out germ warfare was unusual for the Nazis, who preferred more indirect methods -- to overwork and starve their victims until they fell ill of disease.

Death is the repeated motif of this essay, and necessarily of Evans's monumental book, because death and the threat of death were the principal tools of Nazi rule -- the noose, the gas, the gun. For citizens, a list of actions punishable by death might begin with the use of a weapon while committing a crime, hoarding food supplies, damaging military equipment, or making faulty munitions, and end with anything that hindered the war effort, including an injurious comment. Criminals serving a term greater than eight years were too costly to the state to keep swaddled in prison's comforts and were likely to be packed off "for extermination by labor." Some due for release before eight years had passed were retained until they qualified for this extinction. "So many executions were taking place in Germany's state prisons by this time that the Ministry of Justice allowed them at any time of the day instead of, as previously, only at dawn." And the prisons filled and emptied like bowls of peanuts on a bar.

So hospitals, prisons, courts, police, ordinary murderers, labor gangs, suicides, soldiers, Gestapo, the SS, partisans, local militias, enemy fire were all active agents of death, death from all sides the way a billiard caroms: death that fell from the air, death borne by swampy water, death that opened from the earth as if every furrow were a mouth, death by whispered denunciation, death by every means imaginable including highway accidents, common fevers, cancers, strokes, and old age. Yet only one Nazi unit was called the Death's Head, indicating considerable restraint. Of course, there was little need for public boasting about the regime's death-dealing skills. The two Christian institutions (the Lutheran and the Catholic Churches) were quite aware of the killing sprees in their countries of residence but remained mum out of fear of reprisals either from the regime if the Nazis won or from the Jews if Germany lost. This also may have been the most common attitude among the general population. "From 1943 onwards, they were mentally preparing themselves to deflect this retribution as far as they were able, by denying all knowledge of the genocide once the war was lost."

That the war was lost only increased the feverish pace of the killings, which were now defended as a moral necessity, a task to be completed despite temptations to tenderness, and because the cleansing was almost complete. Himmler's message was: The world may condemn us for carrying out such an unpleasant assignment, but somebody's got to do it. The Jews who remained to be gassed lived mostly in Hungary, whose Admiral Miklos Horthy had refused so far Hitler's requests to hand them over. The German army moved in and immediately began carrying out their obligations by transporting 438,000 Jews to -Auschwitz before Horthy was able to put a stop to their shipments.

In the last days, to settle old scores while pretending the enemy was within, Germans began killing one another. It was nearly as if anyone who looked gloomy should be shot. But they were still killing with dedication if not cleverness and invention: 565 inmates of a women's prison were, in the middle of an icy winter, walked to another jail 22 miles away. They kept falling over one another until only 40 remained. From households there was little to loot, but women were still available for rape. Former dignitaries, foreign and domestic, who hadn't been murdered but held hostage instead, were executed forthwith. Those in prison for whatever reason were killed simply because they were handy, just in case, and because the Jews were already dead and someone should be dying: "Sick inmates were shot in their beds . . ." Advancing enemy armies made the murder industry in the concentration camps a matter of some urgency. Yet evidence of gas chambers, shooting locales, and burial parks had to be removed too, and it was difficult to clean up and kill at the same time. Russian prisoners of war, retreating along with German troops, died of weather, deep snows, and neglect. Killing was now casual wherever you were in the combat zone. Death marches so disorganized they "meandered across the country, even doubling back on themselves," at least emptied a camp by scattering bodies over treks of sometimes 250 miles. Nothing but surrender or the arrival of Allied armies slowed and finally ended this last deadly tantrum.

When the Red Army reached Auschwitz it found many corpses, but the SS had left 7,000 prisoners in some stage of life, and they had not destroyed every evidence of the camp's activity. "Russian soldiers painstakingly catalogued 837,000 women's coats and dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes and 7.7 tons of human hair." Finally, the Germans had acquired enough coats.

The Nazis were down for the count, but the count was only at nine when Allied warplanes kicked dozens of towns nearly out of existence (Dresden, most infamously) and the Red Army arrived to repopulate the ruins by raping the women who remained. They brought with them destruction, pillage, theft, murder, and savage revenge. Death, it seems, was also an Allied deity.

Evans, after his usual sober and responsible account of how the end came for Hitler and Goebbels, writes: "The deaths in the bunker and the burned-out streets above were only the crest of a vast wave of suicides without precedent in modern history." This penultimate killing was sometimes done out of an ancestral sense of honor, or from the shame and indignity of a trial that would brand them as criminals, or to avoid the mistreatment of their displayed corpses, or out of despair for Germany and the failure of their enterprises; but not often because they were wrong, not because they were guilty, not because they were moral monsters and could no longer bear the creatures of evil they had become.

Afterward, death would add still more to its roster with trials and hangings. Not just the guilty paid its price. In what was perhaps the final irony, many survivors of the camps would kill themselves because they were alive.

William H. Gass is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine and the author, most recently, of A Temple of Texts. His essay on Katherine Anne Porter appeared in the January issue.

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Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker

by James McManus

Card Studs

A review by Aaron Mesh

Not long after graduating from college, I, like millions of other enthusiasts infected by the millennial poker craze, developed a slightly unhealthy interest in no-limit Texas hold 'em. Nearly every Friday night, I bellied up to a basement card table or, if a home game couldn't be found, ventured out to an East Tennessee bar called Mayo's, where tournaments of dubious legality and $50 buy-ins started every half-hour. Sometimes I won. More often I watched my weekend pocket money go out the door in somebody else's pocket. After bad nights, I would brood over the suspicion that my inability to bet aggressively signaled a deficiency of character.

I wasn't alone in drawing this parallel. Among James McManus's many insights in Cowboys Full is the observation that Americans have long used their homegrown game -- a modified French bluffing contest -- to define the kind of people they want to be: shrewd, bold, unflappable, and streetwise. In tracing poker's lineage from Mississippi riverboats to televised tournaments, McManus argues that gambling strategies influenced national history from the fresh-start aspirations of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (named after the shuffling and distribution of cards) to the deployment of the insuperable atom bomb (described by a Manhattan Project scientist as "a royal straight flush"). Devised in polyglot 1800s New Orleans and honed on riverboats, poker developed as a uniquely American recreation: a contest played by free-market people, each individual convinced he was a little more equal than everyone else.

In his last book, Positively Fifth Street (2003), McManus wryly recounted his improbable fifth-place finish in the 2000 World Series of Poker while on a reporting assignment; as a historian, he is no less lively and nimble. Not a page of Cowboys Full goes by without a crackerjack yarn, as McManus shows how the game, like the country, grew in respectability even as its nature remained fundamentally freewheeling. He compares steamboat cardsharps of the 1830s to the bling-sporting rappers of today and makes a case for poker as the true national pastime, capable of righting baseball's wrongs: Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who fixed the 1919 "Black Sox" World Series, was shot dead after refusing to pay his losses in a stud game he thought was rigged. McManus revives the legends of high-stakes gunslingers Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday, but he also shows how friendly games became a staple of the FDR and Truman Oval Offices. Poker even hewed the destiny of Richard Nixon, who as a World War II Navy lieutenant used his "iron butt" to endure marathon sessions of five-card draw; the $8,000 in winnings he brought home helped stake him to a political career.

In its second half, Cowboys Full shifts focus to the late-20th-century rise of poker as a global spectator sport, with an emphasis on epic Las Vegas tournaments at Binion's Horseshoe casino and emergent World Series of Poker celebrities such as the laconic Texan Doyle Brunson and cocaine-addicted whiz kid Stu Ungar. The game's "grittiness and peril might help to explain why its outlaw cachet continues to linger," McManus writes, "even when today's live games are played mostly by well-scrubbed folks sipping mineral water in state-sanctioned card rooms." Cheating may have diminished -- though it continues to crop up in online games -- but players still feel that they're getting away with something.

McManus suggests a more philosophical side of the game in the person of Herbert O. Yardley, a code breaker, spy, and poker instructor whose nonchalant resilience over three wars and countless careers becomes the book's running joke. Yardley's own book, The Education of a Poker Player (1957), counseled honesty and patience as the virtues of the poker table. "In the end," McManus writes, quoting the journalist Al Alvarez, "what he is describing is not so much a game of cards as a style of life." The game that began as a haven for scofflaws, layabouts, and swindlers can build character, too.

Aaron Mesh is a film critic and general assignment reporter for Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

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Horns

by Joe Hill

Joe Hill's "Horns" Lets Loose the Devilry

A review by Katherine Dunn

As many of his readers already know, Joe Hill is the pen name of Joseph Hillstrom King, the oldest son of Stephen King. Hill toiled for years to succeed as a writer without trading on his father's name. His first collection of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts, won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. When his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, hit the best-seller lists in 2007, the news media got hold of his bloodline and splashed it. Now, with Horns, Hill proves again that he is running on his own steam.

This second novel opens as 26-year-old Ignatius W. Perrish, "Ig" to his friends, wakes up with a homicidal hangover, dim notions of what he did the night before and a pair of demonic horns sprouting from his receding hairline. None of this strikes Ig as entirely inappropriate because it is the first anniversary of the brutal rape and murder of his sweetheart, Merrin Williams.

As the second son of a wealthy family in a small New England town, Ig has always been a decent, churchgoing fellow. Devilry doesn't come easy for him, but it's been a tough year, and he's a fast learner.

The murder was never solved, and the innocent Ig is still the prime suspect. The townsfolk shun him, his friends cut him and even his parents believe he killed the girl he had adored since they were both in their early teens.

Still, Ig fears the horns are a symptom of something fatal so he sets out looking for help for his sudden malady. But the horns have a strange effect on everyone he talks to. Though they are blatantly visible, people forget the horns exist as soon as they look away. More significantly, the horns impel anyone who falls under their sway to blurt out their nastiest notions. The mildest encouragement from Ig himself spurs them to act upon them.

Sick and self-pitying, the horned Ig leaves a stream of mayhem in his wake. A screeching brawl breaks out in the doctor's waiting room, a nun abandons the church and various people tell Ig exactly what they think of him. None of it is flattering.

The devil as depicted in Ig is not so much the perpetrator of evil as its revealer. He is a magnet for human ugliness, and occasionally he retaliates.

This dark comic sequence riffs on the frailty of the social veneer and salutes the functional value of hypocrisy. But it teaches Ig a lot about how to use his horns and the peculiar powers that come with them. It also allows his older brother, Terry, to explain how he knows that Ig did not commit the murder.

Terry's admission triggers everything that follows. It is new evidence that shifts the book dramatically into the form of a nicely crafted psychological crime novel. In long, meandering flashbacks, Ig recalls his earliest times with the beloved Merrin and with his friend Lee Tourneau. These segments are lush and evocative, wistfully nostalgic and engineered for the precise timing of each revelation.

Once the connections are clear, Horns switches back to the supernatural present and becomes a furious thriller with a novice satanic superhero hellbent on revenge.

This serpentine structure can be fuddling, but Hill romps with the details. The title, for instance, plays on multiple levels. Ig sprouts demon horns, but he also wears the metaphorical horns of the cuckold. His father and older brother are famous trumpet players, an instrument denied to Ig because of his asthma. An angelic trumpet blast plays a crucial role in a climactic battle scene.

Some of the character names are potent signifiers. Brother Terry's name, for example, is short for Terence, an early Christian saint who was martyred by being flung into a pit of venomous snakes. That history plays a role in the story. And the diminutive, Ig, is a prefix meaning Not. But Ignatius means fiery -- a trait that becomes increasingly apparent as the tale winds around.

The wise guys point out that the literature of horror fantasy tends to be both romantic and conservative. Normalcy is idealized and so precious that its violation is the essence of horror. Joe Hill's sweet, fanged demonology takes us there.

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The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square

by Gert Jonke

Word Games and Surreal Imagery

A review by Matthew Jakubowski

When Austrian dramatist, poet, and author Gert Jonke died from pancreatic cancer at age 62 last year, British journalist Guy Dammann lamented that he passed just as his readership was finally beginning to match his reputation:

At its height his reputation was grounded principally on the widespread misapprehension about the severe difficulty of his writing. Despite winning the first ever Ingeborg Bachmann prize in 1977, and later the Franz Kafka and Berlin Literature prizes, among numerous others, people tended to respect rather than read Jonke. Which makes it all the more ironic that, just as his reputation was once again on the up -- a resurgence based this time on a real and growing readership -- he has died.

The resurgence Dammann refers to was presumably taking place among Jonke's German-language readership. But English-speakers got some help catching up on Jonke's quirky brilliance this past December, when the Dalkey Archive Press published Vincent Kling's highly enjoyable translation of Jonke's novella-in-stories, The System of Vienna, making it the second Jonke title Dalkey has recently published in English translation.

This richly imaginative book fits fifteen chapters into ninety-eight pages (minus an elegant afterword by Kling). Most chapters in this autobiographical novella focus on a spot in Vienna, and they're recalled in sequence from the narrator's birth through adulthood as he meets odd people who strive to convey knowledge about politics, society, love, and human perception. Jonke's writing isn't difficult, though his sentences can stretch on into multi-page masterpieces, and he's a fan of word games and surreal imagery. But beneath these formal surfaces and experimental style (some have called Jonke a "text composer"), these stories are frequently tender and funny; for all the book's curiosities and through-the-looking-glass moments, System proves Jonke was that rare thing: a huge, rebellious talent with tremendous heart.

In the first chapter, "Beginnings in a Small Southern Austrian City," a mere two pages in length, Jonke chats about "myself and my academic development" as if he were a well-known author, using a punchy, casual tone that is comforting yet deceptive (considering the philosophical flourishes in the stories ahead). Regarding his birth in "the district hospital" in Klagenfurt, Jonke tells "as you probably already know" of how his mother trudges alone through the cold and tries to get in the side door of the hospital, but can't due to regulations upheld by the night porter. After enough berating -- "why else would strict instructions like these exist if they weren't important" -- the porter relents and lets her in to have her baby, the final sentence reading, "After that I -- as the concluding expression goes -- 'turned up in no time,' and, bringing the story to its end, there's a description of my skin, at that point completely blue."

This tiny monologue sets the tone and lays out a major theme of the book. Beneath the ensuing layers of the narrative, using a close or distant voice that changes from story to story, a deliberately unsettling playfulness is in high gear.

Jonke aims to convey the idea that this kind of rebellious play is a serious skill people must nurture in themselves if they're ever going to keep the world's inanity from ruining their spirits. After all, as "Beginnings" shows in its precise and offhand way, even mothers giving birth in small towns will be made to suffer fools in a society more concerned with rules than well-being. It's as if Jonke is saying, Make me wait, will you? Keep me out in the cold until I'm blue -- before I'm even born, will you? All right then, you fuckers. It's on. Jonke worked this sort of lemme at 'em territory at greater length in his social satire Geometric Regional Novel, first published in English in hardcover in 1994 and then in paperback in 2000 by the Dalkey Archive. As a classically trained pianist, Jonke also wrote about music (and based stories on musical forms), as shown in his other books available in English, Blinding Moment: Four Pieces About Composers (Ariadne Books, 2009), and the novel Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (Dalkey Archive, 2008).

As System continues, Jonke's self-as-narrator grows up. "Childhood in the Country" brims with happy and Eden-like language. As if helping to get the reader in shape for the enormous sentences to come, Jonke offers this relatively short gem (cut in half here), describing his early wonder at the natural world:

I spent the hot summers back in those years mostly at the house of a great-aunt in the country, though, where I would sink down into her garden as if into a subtropical rain forest, in the shadows of the larkspur along the trailers and stalks of vegetables with pods and hulls bursting open in the heat, planted all the way out to the twilit place where menacing stands of horsetail and hemlock woods lined a pondoceanswamp in the sour-smelling surf of which the afternoons coursed along . . .

That "pondoceanswamp" shows Jonke satirizing mile-long, German compound words, and the final portion of the quote contains a common Jonke technique wherein units of time, in this case "afternoons," become objects moved by the mind through metaphor, where they can be manipulated in the physical world, side by side with our bodies, just as vulnerable to being moved as we are by nature and chance.

When the book moves from nature into Vienna, however, the action frequently retreats into his mind as microadventures in thought. As the narrator ages he becomes justifiably confused by the foolishness and emptiness and banality of modern urban life. As if to dramatize this, "Wholesale Fish Dealer by the Danube Canal" spins in annoying circles, forcing readers to ask, Why all this stuff about the guy not being a fish dealer? Three pages later, Jonke answers: "Therein was to be sought the reason and the cause of why things are sometimes, mostly sometimes, rather often, sometimes rather often, mostly sometimes rather often, mostly rather often, sometimes mostly mostly, mostly mostly not as they should be." Jonke isn't making a point so much as observing the follies of human communication; to Jonke's great credit, that distinction -- observing, not teaching -- is carefully maintained throughout the book.

This approach, which lets the reader reach conclusions without unnecessary moralizing or preaching, lends power and conviction to the author's driving belief: we're alive and we're adventurous and the world so often thwarts us in our pursuits to understand more and see more.

Yet if there are moments of humanity here, there's also plenty of formalism. In "Attempt to Break Out to Klosterneuberg," Jonke lets the story end like a poem, with short line breaks and all lower-case letters. At another point Jonke adds extra spaces between the letters of each word in a key phrase. (And Dalkey does an admirable job of integrating these typographical devices.) Far from being cold puzzles, though, these tactics mirror the daily challenges of perception and communication that people face. And his use of repetition and layers, as with music, mirror the emotional sequence of how we experience things, remember them, and assemble memories.

Jonke does all this while keeping his readers' best interest in mind. His chapters are compressed without being impenetrably dense, and he uses standard plot elements to frame his greater ambitions, making something new and surprising in the process. This fusion of the traditional and the experimental is exemplified in the wonderful epistolary story, "Jorger Strasse Prelude Hernals Beltway Fugue," where Jonke tucks a moment of human vulnerability into a complex narrative structure, in this case a son caring for his elderly father.

"Fugue" and the next two stories form a thematic downward arc that turns abruptly heavenward at the end of the novel. A nadir is reached in the trio's middle story, with the narrator's suicidal tendencies in "Danube River Bridge." Here Jonke's language demonstrates that he takes depression seriously, even as comedy threatens:

[I] would often walk from bridge to bridge along the banks of the Danube . . . looking down into the river's eyes as they drifted past below, and then spitting down into the river before I resumed my crossing. To this day I am absolutely certain that my spitting down into the water from the bridge was in no way connected with its bringing good luck, as a simplistic folk belief would have it, but was rather a kind of substitute for my not spitting my bodily self in its entirety over the railing along the firmament. Instead of a complete plunge into the river, then, I let drift downward just a few words or sentences, now rendered unutterable through liquefaction, dissolved in my oral cavity from keeping silent so long . . .

The sadness bottoms out then surges upward into the glad but gloomy romantic fantasy, "Caryatids and Atlantes -- Vienna's First Guest Workers," which concludes the trio. The story shows Jonke giving fame the finger, imagining himself as "a creative sleep artist," not a writer hounded by the urge to self-promote but "a sleep interpreter engaged with the completed creation." Throughout this trio Jonke repeats phrases like chords, whole pages of narration stuttering ahead upon rising and falling rhythms, using musicality as a guide for word choice.

This search for music and freedom in language yields eloquent results at the end of the "Klosterneuberg." With its broken lines, like a poem, even in translation we see how the words on the page had to yield to what Jonke was pursuing. It's dreamy stuff that lets his adult narrator feel momentarily ageless. Jonke risks sounding terribly sentimental, but because of the risk he achieves instead the defiant tone of a soul too proud to let time have its way.

and I do go away at once, not without having said goodbye; but no, I don't go, I run, ride back at once on one of those days that have ended before they even began,
on this eveninglikemorningishly afternoonnight;
in fact, this day hasn't even dawned yet.

This review was originally published by The Quarterly Conversation.

Matthew Jakubowski is a freelance writer and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Philadelphia.

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The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America

by Kathleen Gerson

Home Work

A review by Ronnie Steinberg

Some half a century after Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy modeled traditional father-headed family life for the nation, Kathleen Gerson's Unfinished Revolution analyzes how today's ordinary women and men, ages 18 to 32, think about the kinds of families they came from and the kinds they expect to launch.

Gerson chose her sample carefully. She wanted a close look at young people who came of age during an era of increasing labor-force participation by women, rising divorce rates and unstable employment. She called her diverse sample "children of the gender revolution" and included those raised in three types of families: single head-of-household, traditional and dual-earner. It turned out that original family composition didn't predict a whole lot. Almost half of those brought up in single head-of-household families thought their parents' divorce was for the best; 40 percent of those raised in traditional homes also thought it would have been better if their parents had divorced. While fully 80 percent of those brought up in dual-career families believed this the best option, a slight majority of those from traditional families thought it would have been better if their mothers had worked. Most agreed that the concept of family was fluid and that the most successful families had been the most flexible in adapting to changing circumstances.

What, then, do these young people seek for themselves? Almost all wanted a marriage-like relationship; nine of 10 wanted children. As they described their ideal relationship, Gerson found they held a higher set of standards than their parents did. The majority -- female and male -- sought a committed and egalitarian relationship that allowed for flexible roles and room for personal autonomy. These attitudes were held by 75 percent of those from dual-earner families, 90 percent from single head-of-household families and 66 percent from traditional families.

Nonetheless, most doubted their ability to achieve their ideals. As Gerson puts it, personal ideals are "colliding with resistant institutions." These young people feared the time demands of a successful career, the unreliability of partners, the lack of reliable child care. As a result, they have developed "fallback strategies." And here is where women and men diverged: The majority of women see work as essential to survival while looking at marriage as "optional or reversible." Pushed to the wall, they prefer self-reliance over economic dependence, though a third said they were willing to abandon self-reliance as a way to maintain their committed relationship -- but only for a period of time. In contrast, three of four men in her sample considered breadwinning the "most reasonable alternative."

Gerson found that her subjects dismissed collective solutions, even those who recognized that the work-family trade-off comes from outdated institutional arrangements. Regardless of their politics, this generation prefers private solutions; they naively look for the few jobs with significant autonomy, seek quick success or trade money for time. Happily, they reject the traditional family as the only "good" family, but the future of work-family arrangements remains unclear -- and the gender revolution unfinished.

Ronnie Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University.

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Black Elvis (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

by Geoffrey Becker

An Harmonious Collection

A review by Jaspar Lepak

Geoffrey Becker's second book of short stories, Black Elvis, offers a brilliant collection of characters, cities, bizarre relationships, and oddly resonant endings. As the title suggests, music is what holds these stories together: whether the main character is a black man who plays Elvis tunes at a weekly dive-bar blues jam or the scene opens on a Parisian street corner between a Jimi Hendrix impersonator and a fast-tempoed bluegrass fiddler, Becker's keen sense of range for the human condition is written through the lens of music -- though that lens keeps twisting in and out of focus.

Becker's characters are each a unique blend of lies and truth, and reading from one story to the next can feel like hopping a train to another part of the world and landing in the open window of a stranger's apartment. These characters may sleep with a best friend's son on a vacation in Santorini or accept a job finishing paintings for a kitsch cowboy artist in Jackson, Wyoming, but wherever they are, they are uncertain if they have made it to the right place. "Tell me something," asks the Black Elvis, "Is that what you think? Have I gotten it wrong all this time? Should I be doing something else?"

Becker tackles these questions with a strong sense of empathy, and while his characters may be responsible for their problems, it is hard to blame them. The author's genius lies in his ability to bring certain types together to draw out individual complexities -- like the "Black Elvis" who meets the "Asian American Robert Johnson" or the alcoholic father who decides to quit drinking the same day he takes in his dead son's gay lover who is also dying of AIDS. "Opposite colors -- yellow and violet, for instance -- actually seem to tremble when they're next to each other, because our eyes can't adjust for both at the same time." Becker's stories take place within the amount of time it takes his characters to tremble, and then, in his sudden way of ending, Becker leaves them, letting a sort of resonance creep in that is far from resolution.

Often, Becker brings the reader into a story too quickly, stuffing the first few paragraphs with an overload of sensory details -- a clash of cymbals, too many instruments -- but the sounds soon sort themselves out. As the geography and relationships fall into place, it becomes evident that fresh imagery is just another one of Becker's strengths: "The grocery store carries only iceberg lettuce, tight, cold balls of it, shrink-wrapped and shining"; "I thought you were what a Beatles song would look like if it could walk around." An album of confused and fascinating characters encountering strange and unusual places, Black Elvis has something for all readers who sometimes doubt their own sense of direction, and even more for the reader with an ear and a love for music.

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On the Winding Stair (American Reader #12)

by Joanna Howard

Stairs and Flourishes

A review by John Madera

Joanna Howard's lapidary debut On the Winding Stair is an escalier spiraling with brocaded lyricism, alternately swathed in darkness and bathed in phosphorescence. Metaphysical spaces coexist with vivid corporeality in a place where words aren't so much modified as they are baroquely embellished, cast in irreality; we have, as in "Ghosts and Lovers," "[t]he fantastic, the unthinkably thick swirl of sudden change."

Howard's book opens with "Light Carried on Air Moves Less," a story about a "perpetually insomniac specter" enamored of an eccentric beauty whiling away her hours reading from "a swollen, yellowed tome, Pauline's Life of a Madam," and sewing her approximations of the frilly outfits found illustrated within it. Consumed with desire as he watches her act out lascivious poses from the book, the specter pumps his handcar crank, the motion of which creates "a cyclonic whirl" that picked up the hair of the pale beauty, tore away the garish and delicate chemise and in a last, fitful tug, scooped up the long white body whose momentary rapture was focused on the vibrant earthly manifestation of a wind so powerful it could move rust-bound handcars on weed-lashed tracks, so powerful it could make a storm of scarves obscuring the moon, powerful enough to grant the wishes of pale, hungry girls.

Like a fever dream, every sense is heightened in these stories. Every smell is fermented, every sight is lush, every taste is pungent, every sound reverberates. The stories are sodden with detail, saturated with color and have a lacquered brilliance mirroring the luxuriant abundance of 17th century Dutch Golden Age painting. And they're simply choked with vegetation: the "melon-blossomed trumpet vines"; "long spindly shoots of Rose of Sharon"; "unvascilate" pasture grass; juniper shrubs; corn and sorghum fields; crops "yellowing and weeping downward, like, like suicides"; "trackside ditches of sumac"; the "weeping overhang of mistletoe clotted in the joints of spare-leaved elms"; catnip and crabgrass; mulberry trees; pyracantha; "lavender sprig nosegay" blooming from a dandy's buttonhole; the dandy's beloved apple blossoms; the "succulent leaves of purslane."

"Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman" is about a waif of a girl who, "[s]evered and refitted… begins the flight to [a] strange future from [an] imagined past." "Exchange" is a tiny, mysterious gem almost bursting with intimations of seduction, intrigue, betrayal. "The Black Cat" is a dark set of nested boxes complete with car accident, hilltop mansion, creepy underground lair, and seance. Another apparition appears, this time from a "portrait in brooding oils" in "Seascape." Here, the narrator's unworldly infatuation with a dead sea captain gives way to love, and, in a bizarre twist, when the captain finally leaves, she remains to haunt the cottage. Another ghost appears in "What Was There Was Gone, Burning" and ends with another ghost's appearance. While the presence of ghosts is obvious in "Ghosts and Lovers" -- a novel in the Diane Williams sense of the word -- the atmosphere is no less mysterious.

On the Winding Stair's body count is considerable. Besides the implied, but long since decomposed corpses of "Light Carried on Air Moves Less" and "Seascape," there are the four great-uncles dead from gunshot wounds in "Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen," the car accident crumpled chauffer in "The Black Cat," and the drowned man in "Russian Doll" who bobs "like an undulating mound, a waterlogged paunch arcing out of the water." And there is the mother in "Ghosts and Lovers" who "had fallen from a train crossing the border."

While certainly sharing similar themes with Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Rikki Ducornet, and Kelly Link, Howard's style suggests Mervyn Peake, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michal Ajvaz, and Nabokov at his extreme descriptive best, as well a shared affinity for disjunction and refraction reminiscent of John Ashbery, all while gazing perspicaciously at language through the same loupe that master jeweler Wallace Stevens used. Howard's stories are, as one of her characters says, like "going through a maze, you can make so many turns. You may get to the center, but it would take awhile. At some point along the way, maybe you forget the center." In short, Howard's stories are, modifying a phrase from her book, "lovely views from harrowing ruins."

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Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

by Thomas Mallon

Personal Compositions

A review by Louis Bayard

My father wrote me once a week when I was in college. Chitchat, for the most part. "Your Uncle Joe called....Dishwasher went out....Had a nice jog this morning." Exactly the kind of stuff people post on Facebook now. I read each of his letters exactly once and put it . . . where? That's what I couldn't remember in the days and weeks after his death. I went through box after box, hunting for those ancient relics, and when I realized they were well and truly gone, I felt as if I'd betrayed not just my father but the whole point of his writing me in the first place.

For isn't there a sacred premise behind every letter? That it will be kept and savored as long as there are eyes to read? Then again, how many of the letters we've received over the years are still with us? And what has happened to the letters we ourselves cast into the world? Is anyone brooding over those?

Letter writing may be an art, as Thomas Mallon argues in his richly entertaining overview, but it is a highly contingent and perishable one -- a bit like the mural that Joyce Cary's half-mad artist, Gulley Jimson, paints as a valedictory on a condemned church. For a letter to survive, someone must deem it worth saving, and someone must deem it worth passing down. The famous correspondence of Madame de Sevigne, valued as much for its aphoristic pith ("I fear nothing so much as a man who is witty all day long") as for its insights into the court life of Louis XIV, was pruned and, in some cases, rewritten by her granddaughter. Scottie Fitzgerald would coldly examine her illustrious dad's notes for "checks and news," then dump them in her desk drawer. (It was her daughter who later compiled and published them.) Tennessee Williams's letters to his sometime muse Maria St. Just have been set aside for posterity, but where are the pages she wrote in reply? Did Williams toss them away in a fit of pique? Or did they just vanish into the maelstrom of his life?

Even letters that survive the test of time may face a stiffer test from history. The words of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill will always command attention. But what of a long-forgotten literary critic named Francis Matthiessen, whom we find in Mallon's book building a romantic life with another man? What of the deaf English seamstress tensely negotiating her future with a tailor? The Oxford language student struggling to remain faithful to her soldier lover on the far side of the world?

It's to Mallon's credit that he is attuned to the drama of these seemingly undramatic lives -- and to the grim irony that letter writing today thrives most in extremis, among the prisoners and refugees who have been deprived of electronic communication. "Our situations are very different," an imprisoned dissident writes Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping; "you are at the top of a billion people and I am at the very bottom -- but life isn't easy for either of us. It's just that I am not the one making your life difficult, while you're the one making it hard for me."

That power imbalance is, at least in the context of this letter, neutralized. Addresser speaks to addressee on equal terms. Still, Mallon knows that most of us approach a volume like this not for democracy in action but for the aristocracy of gossip. This he delivers in abundance. H. L. Mencken on Wallis Simpson: "a highly oxidized double-divorcee." Hannah Arendt on Vladimir Nabokov: "There is something vulgar in his refinement." Oscar Wilde on fickle Bosie (his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas): "The mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him."

Telegrams, suicide notes, memos, execution-eve manifestoes -- they're all here. Oh, sure, you may mourn the critters who got away: Elizabeth Bishop or Evelyn Waugh or, hell, Emile Zola. (Was "J'accuse," his open letter defending Alfred Dreyfus, too public a performance?) But you're as likely to be astonished by how much Mallon has packed into so small a space: Helene Hanff's transatlantic flirtation with Charing Cross bookseller Frank Doel; Walter Raleigh's curiously pragmatic and, as events would prove, premature last testament; Sullivan Ballou's heart-rending farewell to his wife on the eve of Bull Run (almost impossible to read now without the strains of "Ashokan Farewell" in your ear). If Yours Ever runs more wide than deep, that is at least partly a function of its subject. Letters must often compress a great deal of ore into a small seam -- they make a virtue of their own impoverishment -- and the best letter-writers are those who strike pay dirt with the least amount of spadework. This is what Mallon does, again and again. He writes of Colette, living her life "as a kind of giant maw." Of Lord Byron, bent from birth on "becoming an adjective." Of John Keats: "No matter how hard circumstances press, the bedsprings of his self are available for falling back on; the harder his fall, the more cheerful his squeak."

I particularly liked Mallon's take on Philip Larkin, who "craved sooty windows the way others do bright lights" and whose letters illuminate "the distinction between happiness and fulfillment. The former may be what one wants, but the latter is what one needs, and as such is much more profound. Philip Larkin's natural temperament was deeply, depressingly fulfilled."

We might question Mallon's fondness for puns ("Pushkin came to shove") and his dismissal of John Milton, an advocate for divorce and a free press, as "English literature's most august and terrifying adherent to convention." There are moments, too, when the literary worth of a particular writer (Jean Harris, say, or Neal Cassady) is more obvious to Mallon than to the reader. But there is no denying the love that undergirds the author's labor or the seemingly laborless way in which he calls these dead pages back to life.

What kind of life, though? That's the question that began niggling at me the moment I closed this delightful book. Yours Ever is conceived as a museum for a lost art, and it is not hard to see Mallon as the docent in the cardigan sweater, ushering us into each room and then sending us off into the gloaming of modernity. "Mr. Jobs's world," he calls it. By which he means a benighted land where people have lost all capacity for reflection and "considered exchange." Where even educated folk are reduced to sending text messages that read, in their entirety, "r u there?" Where "addictive gratifications have replaced the old, slow anticipation of the daily visit from the mailman."

There is, in short, a reflexive melancholy to Mallon's self-appointed mission, and I'm not convinced that all his belletristesse is merited. (Then again, waiting for the mailman has always struck me as a dubious pleasure.) When I sift through my past week's electronic in-box, I find easily half a dozen messages that qualify as letters in every traditional sense. They are coherently structured, written with care and design. They enlighten, they illuminate, they endear. They even follow the old epistolary ritual of signing off (not "yours ever," but some venerable variant: "yours" ...cheers" ...all best" ..."xo"). My e-mail may not ascend to the level of Madame de Sevigne, but then, neither did Madame de Sevigne all the time.

More to the point, these messages would probably never have come my way if the senders had been obliged to take out pen and paper. Indeed, it is the very facility of electronic communication that makes the Luddite soul tremble. When Mallon complains that e-mail has "made the telegram's instant high dudgeon affordable to all," it is clear that the access troubles him as much as the dudgeon. Look at me! I'm a belletrist, too! But does the relative ease of an e-mail's composition necessarily detract from its value? Are postage stamps a bona fide of literary intent?

Even in the age of tweets and pokes and blasts, the impulse to bring order to our thoughts and lives persists, and at the risk of sounding like a technojingoist, one might argue that technology facilitates this impulse as much as it impedes it. One might even envision a day when the electronic message becomes more durable than the letter, when we no longer have to rummage through cellar shadows for our father's old notes because our hard drives have tucked them away in some brightly lit corner.

That's not the story Thomas Mallon set out to write, but with his wit and range of reference, his curiosity and gift for synthesis, he is as equipped as anyone to write it. Let us hope, then, that he hasn't signed off on the subject completely, that he is even now composing some postscript that will, instead of making a fetish of loss, observe without prejudice as our missives leave the printed page and head in still-unguessed directions.

Louis Bayard is the author of several novels, including The Black Tower (2008), The Pale Blue Eye (2006), and Mr. Timothy (2003). His reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Salon.

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