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What happens when you turn a Philip Marlowe or a Patrick Kenzie into a wizard? Honestly nothing too earth-shattering, at least not in this first novel of the popular Dresden files. Mostly the book rides on the novelty of turning femme fatales into vampires and having the wise-cracking and laconic protagonist mix things up by shooting lightning instead of .38 caliber slugs. The charms of a solid, hard-boiled detective story detective story still linger, but where a writer like Dennis Lehane allows each new scene, every fresh twist to fluidly peel away the layers of his complex and engaging characters and build up to a thematically coherent climax and denouement, Butcher blusters crudely and rather floridly over the action through his protagonist, trying to imbue comparatively flat characters and a tightly structured, but by-the-numbers plot with more emotional force than either element has a right to. Dresden mentions his requisite troubled past several times, but the conflict at hand has only superficial bearing on Dresden’s inner turmoil, and so aside from the most basic stakes of wanting to see Dresden survive the physical danger posed in the story, there isn’t much to encourage a reader’s investment in the character over the course of the novel.

When I was a kid, I liked rules. What’s more a lot of these rules came from my own parents, who I loved and who loved me. I was shy and cautious, and as far as I could see life was pretty simple; rules were for our own good, and people who stuck to the rules were happy, but people who broke the rules were not.  Of course this convenient dichotomy soon started to tear at the seams. Exceptions to the rules cropped up, and I found myself frantically trying to sew the seams back together. When that no longer worked I began tossing aside a few of my parents’ rules, first reluctantly, and eventually rather gleefully. I came to possess new beliefs, and the experience rather thrilled me. After a while though, some of my new beliefs began, in turn, to wear just as thin as my parents’ beliefs. Any set of beliefs, convictions, or values threatens to crumble at some point under the chaotic forces at work in the world. The drive to make sense of the world, especially by creative means, can sometimes run dry in the face of discouragement. It can become tempting to give in to despair, and save ourselves from being disappointed ever again by falling into a permanently standoffish relationship with the idea of belief itself. An artist struggling in the face of such despair could easily take refuge in a storytelling tradition fixated on aesthetics and form over everything else, and that sees the literary achievements of the past as no more than lines of text, arranged in a pattern made only to be broken down, and not as the stuff with which we connect ourselves to the world and to other people, and to help us live a more fulfilling life. But can an artist really be said to be creative if all they do is destroy what came before? For my money, I think such an artist only has half of the picture in mind. It’s human nature to test the rules of both our biological and literary parents, but the journey has to come full circle. David Foster Wallace played a key part in jolting the literature of the recent past out of despondency, and his comment on literature devoted to destruction still rings true:

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.

Given his dissatisfaction with postmodernist preoccupations, it’s no surprise that Wallace wrote a review of Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank’s biography of the literary titan, and commended Frank’s commitment to giving readers an exhaustive understanding of the ideological climate in which Dostoevsky wrote his great novels. In his review, Wallace compares Dostoevsky’s struggle with the nihilism infecting Russian thinking with the “nihilistic spell” under which so many of Wallace’s own contemporaries had fallen. Compared to these contemporaries of Wallace’s throwing up in the umbrella stand, Dostoevsky is a rejuvenating voice of parental authority, calling readers and writers to provide some order to their house.

This is not to say that The Idiot is necessarily comforting. The nihilism against which Dostoevsky was fighting by writing the novel would not have been threatening if the despair that fed it were not a beast capable of persisting beyond nineteenth-century Russia, on into the literary culture in which Wallace and Frank found themselves twenty years ago, and continuing to trouble us today. The titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies all the values that Dostoevsky hoped would save Russia from this despair. Like a loving parent trying to make everything better he plies the people around him with love: the delusional General Ivolgin, the manic Nastasya Filippovna, the violent Rogozhin, the obsequious Lebedev. They all cannot bring themselves to put aside their egos and put themselves under a loving hand, and most all of them come to tragic ends. They become trapped in a late-night revel of their own making.

Though despair overcomes most of the characters, the love with which Myshkin sought to cure them is just as tenacious. Though the loving would-be parent of Dostoevsky’s characters is banished to a Swiss Sanatorium, the need which he offers to fill does not go away. We might be trapped in an authority-free, spiritually malnourished environment, but we can be our own parents. We can bring some order to the world, even if it doesn’t last. Our hearts will break, but better to have a broken heart capable of love, than be the cool kid who tries to hold the world at arm’s length.

When I was a kid, I liked rules. What’s more a lot of these rules came from my own parents, who I loved and who loved me. I was shy and cautious, and as far as I could see life was pretty simple; rules were for our own good, and people who stuck to the rules were happy, but people who broke the rules were not.  Of course this convenient dichotomy soon started to tear at the seams. Exceptions to the rules cropped up, and I found myself frantically trying to sew the seams back together. When that no longer worked I began tossing aside a few of my parents’ rules, first reluctantly, and eventually rather gleefully. I came to possess new beliefs, and the experience rather thrilled me. After a while though, some of my new beliefs began, in turn, to wear just as thin as my parents’ beliefs. Any set of beliefs, convictions, or values threatens to crumble at some point under the chaotic forces at work in the world. The drive to make sense of the world, especially by creative means, can sometimes run dry in the face of discouragement. It can become tempting to give in to despair, and save ourselves from being disappointed ever again by falling into a permanently standoffish relationship with the idea of belief itself. An artist struggling in the face of such despair could easily take refuge in a storytelling tradition fixated on aesthetics and form over everything else, and that sees the literary achievements of the past as no more than lines of text, arranged in a pattern made only to be broken down, and not as the stuff with which we connect ourselves to the world and to other people, and to help us live a more fulfilling life. But can an artist really be said to be creative if all they do is destroy what came before? For my money, I think such an artist only has half of the picture in mind. It’s human nature to test the rules of both our biological and literary parents, but the journey has to come full circle. David Foster Wallace played a key part in jolting the literature of the recent past out of despondency, and his comment on literature devoted to destruction still rings true:

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents.

Given his dissatisfaction with postmodernist preoccupations, it’s no surprise that Wallace wrote a review of Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank’s biography of the literary titan, and commended Frank’s commitment to giving readers an exhaustive understanding of the ideological climate in which Dostoevsky wrote his great novels. In his review, Wallace compares Dostoevsky’s struggle with the nihilism infecting Russian thinking with the “nihilistic spell” under which so many of Wallace’s own contemporaries had fallen. Compared to these contemporaries of Wallace’s throwing up in the umbrella stand, Dostoevsky is a rejuvenating voice of parental authority, calling readers and writers to provide some order to their house.

This is not to say that The Idiot is necessarily comforting. The nihilism against which Dostoevsky was fighting by writing the novel would not have been threatening if the despair that fed it were not a beast capable of persisting beyond nineteenth-century Russia, on into the literary culture in which Wallace and Frank found themselves twenty years ago, and continuing to trouble us today. The titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies all the values that Dostoevsky hoped would save Russia from this despair. Like a loving parent trying to make everything better he plies the people around him with love: the delusional General Ivolgin, the manic Nastasya Filippovna, the violent Rogozhin, the obsequious Lebedev. They all cannot bring themselves to put aside their egos and put themselves under a loving hand, and most all of them come to tragic ends. They become trapped in a late-night revel of their own making.

Though despair overcomes most of the characters, the love with which Myshkin sought to cure them is just as tenacious. Though the loving would-be parent of Dostoevsky’s characters is banished to a Swiss Sanatorium, the need which he offers to fill does not go away. We might be trapped in an authority-free, spiritually malnourished environment, but we can be our own parents. We can bring some order to the world, even if it doesn’t last. Our hearts will break, but better to have a broken heart capable of love, than be the cool kid who tries to hold the world at arm’s length.

Conflict is the engine of every narrative, but it is the engine of every individual life, every culture, and every age. Because conflict takes up so much of our time and energy, we often look to the past, the conflicts of which all have-- or at least appear to have-- cemented resolutions chronicled by museums, monuments, and books. Because past struggles have endings, which even an amateur historian can see, the present, the order of which is more often to meet conflict than it is to rejoice inconflict overcome, seems like exile from an Eden we have lost.

Though Tuchman subtitles her book as The Calamitous Fourteenth Century-- and medieval Europe has received little to no commendation as any kind of Golden Age-- before cataloguing the trials that beset that time and place Tuchman notes that any age, even a troubled one, has light against which the darkness appears that much more threatening. Even amongst the draconian taxes, brigandage, and plague life often found a way to continue in relative peace. Even Tuchman’s choice of protagonist for her narrative history book is an exception that proves the rule. Enguerrand de Coucy VII, though living in times where the rule was licentiousness and vainglory, was, as far as can be gleaned, a man who practiced temperance, and level-headedness.

Using Coucy’s life as a focal point, Tuchman addresses the day-to-day of the nobility, the peasantry, and the clergy; she pauses to contextualize Coucy’s marriage to Isabella of England within the larger goings-on of The Hundred Years’ War, his campaigns in Italy within the Papal Schism, and his fateful journey to Nicopolis within the chronic medieval crusading. Always striking a premium balance between accumulative of raw data, and a lucid structure, Tuchman’s benchmark for popular history is well worth a read, especially for someone looking to move up from the sophomoric, dumbed-down pseudo-medieval histories that dominate a lot of the fantasy and historical fiction clogging up the shelves at Barnes and Noble.

I feel I need not speak at any length about the dubious amount of actual history contained in this influential little volume, nor would I bet money on Monmouth believing in the strict historicity of his work when he wrote it. Monmouth does, unfortunately, believe a little to readily in the patriotic spirit, which obviously inspired him to write it. Where one might smile at the slight ridiculousness of Dumas’s Musketeers, Monmouth invites no such balance of opinion where the monarchs of legend are concerned. That is not to say that moral gray areas escape his notice completely. Brutus, Lear, and Arthur are capable of brutality, and the Romans and Saxons are often spoken of in admirable tones, but Monmouth’s overall message is rather tribal. Monmouth explicitly comments on the irony of Britain’s on and off conflict with Rome, given that legend attributes the founding of Britain and the founding of Rome to the same family. Yet the full implications of this ironic comment never inform the work. Monmouth writes his history with a self-righteous tone that only increases with each chapter. After Britain becomes christianized, the Romans and the Saxons receive the full weight of Monmouth’s scorn, with only a passing compliment here or there. It is still worth reading, given its influence, but as a piece of art in its own right, its accomplishments are rather meager.

In my last review I spoke briefly about the entertainment-biased and substance-biased schools of writers. Musketeers is perhaps the most iconic and enduring success story for entertainers. Strictly speaking, the oeuvres of William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens might also lay claim to the title, but at present these two authors are generally far more popular among writers of high school and college curricula than they are among lay readers. The halo of Musketeers’ reputation, on the other hand, has always been a beacon of excitement and emotional appeal more so than depth or realism, though it possesses all these qualities. Like any dedicated writer of pulp, Dumas first excises self-righteousness and pretentiousness from Musketeers, favoring adventure and romance, whenever he finds himself having to choose between the two extremes. Dumas’s approach to his subject matter provides the inverse to Tolstoy’s zealously written War and Peace, with each novel providing identical levels of quality from their respective corners.

Though the plot twists come like clockwork with every chapter, the constantly ramped up action rises organically from characters with striking virtues and vices, which altogether form compelling personalities. the famous protagonist, d’Artagnan, possesses all the qualities that have been proven to win affection from massive numbers of readers: bravery, loyalty, perceptiveness, virility, and dashing good looks. Though one never doubts the overarching goodness and attractiveness of d’Artagnan’s character, Dumas manages to stir up affection and admiration for the young Gascon without completely omitting, glossing over, or uncomfortably twisting into virtue d’Artagnan’s less savory actions. Dumas likewise brings Porthos to task for his bluster and hot-headedness, and Aramis’s piety also contains amusing notes of naivete and even slight hypocrisy. Even Athos loses his composure, and wallows in drink from time to time.

The love stories are also very romantic and geared towards emotional involvement, but never saccharine, nor pointlessly salacious. Dumas might very well have taken pleasure at imagining the blushes of prudish Sunday-school teachers, but he always weaves together the complete picture; both the libidos and the nobler affections of each character all come into play. The men can be both cruel and chivalrous, and the women can be manipulative as well as brazenly honest. The women also have marvellous personality and willpower. They make the men work for their affection. D’artagnan intrigues Constance Bonacieux right away-- as one expects from a daring hero--, but she meets his first, overzealous overtures with pitying smiles as well as flirtatious batting of eyelashes. Dumas takes a refreshing amount of time to develop the relationship, and illustrate the emotional arcs taking place for both parties.

Dumas is one of literature’s consummate entertainers, and all the more so because he does not have to resort to escapism to achieve his ends. He has written a tale of love and derring-do, but the infectious humor and lightheartedness that he brings to bear on his subject matter allows one to see the chivalrous ideals here presented with an eye equally capable of admiration and skepticism. One could well stoop to hero-worshipping the deeds of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, but I rather think Dumas would have his readers stand toe to toe with the objects of their admiration. After all, d’Artagnan, though young and green, always has one more word to add, one more idea to present whenever trouble faces him and his three friends. I doubt that Dumas imagined a code of chivalry set in stone that defies questioning or attempts at improvement. I myself am not prone to violence, and certainly not to unchecked jingoism, but Dumas has certainly made me more hopeful than I have been in a long while about the possibility to temper ferociousness with conscience.

So often a reader’s patience flags when wandering back and forth between the seemingly warring ethea of pulp writers and literary authors. The callowness and triviality attributed to the former sends a reader to the canon of the latter, only to retreat from its frequent pretentiousness and self-righteousness. Of course, only the most misguided writers ever consciously attempt to improve their stories by bowdlerizing either of these elements completely. Even so, the substance-biased and the entertainment-biased schools of writing seem to often compete with each other to see who can find the happy medium most often. In recent years, several notable artists in the entertainers’ camp have taken a turn in the winner’s circle. A vocal and sizable contingent of critics have dared to acclaim the 21st century television dramas of David Chase, David Simon, Vince Gilligan, and Jenji Kohan as nothing less than the great literature of our age; Dennis Lehane-- a personal favorite-- has won comparable critical acclaim, and even a seat on Harvard’s faculty teaching creative writing thanks to his fast-paced crime thrillers.

A smaller, but no less vocal, contingent of artists, critics, and fans have attributed similar success to the pulp writers of the early 20th century. Robert E. Howard-- along with H.P. Lovecraft-- stands as the reigning king of this community, and Conan the Barbarian universally heralded as his finest creation. Having now read the first of three volumes containing Howard’s original Conan stories, I cannot help but square Howard off against the entertainment-biased writers of more recent years. Overall, I have to say the Conan stories hold up pretty well. Though Howard often uses sex and violence, the staples of most popular fiction in any medium, for escapist ends, his best stories manage to offer an insightful take on the occasional usefulness and the eternal inescapability of violence, though he handles the sexual dynamics of his stories with overall less aplomb. And unfortunately, for every superior story he writes, Howard pens five to ten unremarkable yarns. Even Conan’s superior adventures still offer less intriguing explorations of survival, barbarism, civilization, and sexual politics than one can find in Lehane’s Kenzie and Gennaro novels or Chase’s The Sopranos.

Of the two elements, violence is, as I said, the most virile chamber in the heart driving the Conan stories. Whenever Howard is not pitting Conan against a supernatural horror or a gigantic snake, he transplants Conan into a civilized milieu, where the barbarian’s uncivilized and forthright nature draws him into conflict with individuals in whom civilization has bred perverse desires alien to Conan’s upbringing in the wilderness. Howard claimed that he found the cliché of the noble savage inaccurate, and tried to inject some biting realism into his portrait of Conan; sometimes he even succeeds. Conan’s adventures are exciting, but Patrice Louinet says quite rightly in his preface that great cataclysms both  precede and succeed those adventures, consigning all Conan’s achievement back to dust, which the barbarian himself muses on in a fit of melancholy in the first draft of “The Phoenix on the Sword.”

However, in that little detail lies Howard’s frequent failing; this musing is all but expunged in the final version of “Phoenix,” and the inferior stories in this volume depict Conan as no more than “a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom,” the very cliché that Howard says he wants to combat. I had hoped that clear-eyed insight would present itself in every story to varying degrees, but so often Howard abandons it completely for a paycheck. The inferior version of Conan, which Louinet and other Howard fans insist is the sole responsibility of Howard’s imitators, seems in fact to be Howard’s own creation to which he resorted whenever greater inspiration failed him. Howard demonstrates far more insight in his essay, “The Hyborian Age” than he does in the first third of his Conan stories: Gorm, the Pictish warlord evinces greater moral complexity than Conan. His rise to power illustrates the “grim, bloody, ferocious, and loveless existence” that Howard knows barbarism to be, and that twisted machinations dwell just as often in the heart of a barbarian as they do in a civilized individual.

Howard’s occasionally cloying attraction to barbarism seems to lie in its ability to endow strength or toughness. Howard does not err in wedding this toughness to a naturally heroic and morally upright individual, but Conan never loses an opportunity to credit his upbringing in the wilds with not just with his strength but with his heroism as well, and every damsel he rescues inevitably thinks to herself how wrong she was to look to civilized men for nobility when it obviously comes more naturally to an untamed Cimmerian like Conan. Howard also takes a false step in only labeling societies separated from civilization as barbaric in a potentially ennobling way. What is truly barbaric is having to struggle, not to thrive, but to simply survive. This struggle is the lot not just of primitive hunter-gatherers, but also of people living in a major city right at the heart of civilization. Dennis Lehane endows Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro with the same toughness that characterizes Conan, and they too possess strident moral compasses that drive them to heroic accomplishments. However, the tough neighborhood badge of honor they wear has a cynical side far more in evidence in both Lehane’s narrative voice, and in the voices of the characters themselves than that of Howard or Conan.

For all the flaws in Howard’s depiction of violence in his actual stories, he at least proved himself capable of occasional inventiveness. The sexual aspect of his stories, unfortunately, rises above tasteless pandering even less than the violence. Never at any point in these stories, does a woman appear who does not succumb to Conan’s charms. There are touches of personality to differentiate each of Conan’s damsels from each other, and they have other motivations aside from sleeping with the musclebound hero. However, Howard tramples even these meager accomplishments by only ever depicting Conan as a positive force in the lives of his love-interests, despite the reality that even a good guy will makes mistakes in any relationship. The only story in which Howard gave himself the opportunity to correct this imbalance is “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” in which Conan shows himself capable of rape. Unfortunately, Howard saves himself from having to fully contend with this more violent aspect of Conan’s character by whisking the would-be victim into the heavens before Conan can catch her. While it makes for an interesting story to have Conan unwittingly cross paths with a goddess, he also gives his hero an awkwardly clean record by not deigning to portray such an exchange to its fullest implications.

Just as Lehane exceeded Howard in his portrayal of barbaric struggle for survival, David Chase offers a far more varied and realistic array of sexual dynamics in The Sopranos than Howard does in The Cumming of Conan. While the iconic HBO drama never loses the opportunity to parade tits and ass before the audience, the characters who possess them are fully fleshed out in more ways than bra size. Tony Soprano’s relationships with his wife, his goomars, and his therapist never insult the viewer by omitting a darker side. Tony is a protective and even affectionate husband, but he often fights Carmela when she tries to assert her independence by starting her own bank account, or considers getting a job. And of course he cheats on her to devastating effect in more ways than one. Then there is the sainted Dr. Melfi, who admits to seeing why Tony is attractive to so many women, but possesses enough intelligence and willpower to see what a bad partner he would make for her, not to mention the fact the she is his therapist. Even when she contemplates relying on Tony for the protection she knows he would give if asked, she soldiers through on her own steam.

Given the superior way in which Lehane and Chase have managed to write exciting and titillating stories without sacrificing their realism, I have to recommend them before Howard’s Conan tales. However, I would still recommend them. Howard has a masterful sense of pacing, and though there are eye-rolling moments, the action never flags. His disjointed, episodic delivery is great fun, and his influence on the sword and sorcery genre alone is enough excuse to give the stories a read.

Several months ago I read Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetralogy. Her homages to  Welsh myths were lyrically told; they contained characters whose struggles and motivations were extraordinarily compelling, and the gender dynamics in particular were sensitively and insightfully written. Walton proudly expressed her loyalty to her source material, saying that she did not cut anything from the original Welsh tales, but only fleshed out what was there. Having been charmed by Walton’s stories, I eagerly took up my first selection from one of her influences. What Walton would go on to do for The Mabinogi, Stephens does here for several stories from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. Unfortunately, where Walton would add meat and viscera to her sources, Stephens just seems to repackage the same old bones, but in a neater package. Walton leaves one curious to peruse the original myths, because one has seen the enticing fruits it has borne when planted in a fertile imagination. Stephens collection mostly just leaves one dissatisfied. Stephens sometimes refers to other stories, but does not retell them in detail, even though the ones he does retell are not always as interesting as those only hinted at or possibly left completely out. One thirsts for the actual sources after reading Stephens because there is greatness hinted at, but not realized. That said. there are some beautifully written passages here, and the better stories are well worth reading.

This trifle of a book has more value as a pocket encyclopedia for the basic categories of apparitions that haunt the collective Irish imagination than as a collection of stories worth reading in their own right. The collection does contain a few standouts: the few poems here present are especially beautiful, and “Flory Cantillon’s Funeral” was my particular favorite for its simple, haunting ending. The rest of the stories are not bad, but they either bluster on for two or three pages too many, or they feel grievously truncated. Many of the stories in each section cover very familiar tonal and thematic ground as well, so that soldiering through them all sometimes becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. Many of the stories have a grim moral backbone to them. Though hardly unforgivable in a fairy tale, the most heavy-handed examples, such as “Teig O’Kane and the Corpse” and “The Priest’s Soul,” contain only a few innovative grace notes to save them from complete mediocrity. These stories, and a few others, feature wayward young protagonists who convert to the straight and narrow only after a threat of death from an angel, mischievous trooping fairies, or some other righteous apparition. These stories are better left told by parents whose child’s hooliganism has worn their patience to the nub, rather than readers looking for an intriguing take on personal evolution and moral maturation. The humorous stories are most rewarding when told one at a time in a bar while trying to make one’s friends laugh rather than taken all at once in a sitting.

A helpful little book, if not especially exhaustive for use as reference material to those interested in the conditions aboard the ships ferrying immigrants during the Great Famine. It clocks in at only 250 pages, which is great for anyone in a basic run-through of the different kinds of ships involved in the exodus, the ports between which they travelled, and the practices of both the companies that owned them and the governments that oversaw them. Laxton, himself an Irishman, approaches the subject with a mildly self-righteous tone, which is understandable, but occasionally makes the book more preachy and melodramatic than informative.

When I read Lewis Carroll’s first and more iconic children’s novel concerning Alice’s adventures, I swam through it joyfully, but nearly thoughtlessly. I found it readable, but its madness seemed, at the time, to gleefully flick me on the end of my nose for seriously considering what the book’s subtext could be. For whatever reason, the wrong side of a looking-glass provided a more lucid point from which to take in Carroll’s inventive and rewarding confection of a story. This time around I gleaned the value a child, or an adult, might get from carrying his or her whimsy out of Wonderland, and back home.

Adults so often frighten children, thinking that they are teaching them to escape danger, and therefore stay safe. But one need not frighten children into avoiding whatever is nasty in the world; even when a good story does use fear, it is not to petrify and immobilize children, but to give them something to overcome. What’s brilliant about Carroll is that Alice’s adventures, both down the rabbit hole and through the looking-glass, do not even use fear at all as the hurdle to be overcome. He deals instead with madness, nonsense, and silliness. The view one gets on the other side of the looking-glass is skewed, but it is still just a backwards version of the real world. All the misused language and anti-logic employed by queens and knights can be found just as often in ordinary life. What better way to stimulate children then to teach them how to sniff out bullshit, but also be able to laugh at themselves when they step in it?

Nature is a cruel joke. It plagues us with natural disasters and disease, the destructive potential of which is equalled only by our own tempestuous inclinations. We heal the damage wrought by these forces the best we can with Apollo’s gifts: we heal the sick with medicine, we shed light where there is darkness, and we soothe our spirits with music. Sometimes we tell ourselves that there is nothing these gifts cannot overcome. Whenever our hubris swells to this degree we need individuals who remind us that nature-- especially human nature-- can shrug off our attempts to collar it whenever it pleases. Our fellow human beings  trample us pursuing their own ends, as the Greeks did Hecuba. Like Phaethon or Narcissus, we often require no worse enemy than ourselves. We are not so different, as it turns out, from the birds and beasts above which we place ourselves.

Ovid was one of those individuals who saw all the best and worst the world offers. He undermined hubris, and wove a madcap string of tales in which humans vie for their place in the natural order, often at the expense of their sanity or their lives. He mined the mythology inherited by the Romans, and crafted a treasure that dazzles one with its insight. As his stories unfold to the point of his epic’s final book, Ovid tells the tale of Numa, who ascends the Roman throne, and plans a fruitful reign:

He knows his people’s laws and customs-- but

that’s not enough for Numa: now he wants

his spacious spirit to encompass more:

he sets himself to study nature’s laws.

For love of this, he leaves his native Cures;

he journeys to the town where Hercules

was once a guest. And there, when Numa asked

who’d founded that Greek town in Italy,

an elder, one who was indeed well versed

in ancient lore, replied...

Up to this point Ovid has crafted a fearful dreamscape, filled with fantastical, almost nonsensical beauty. This train of heartrending transformations, though beautiful, could easily leave a person afraid of the world and afraid of themselves, but there is hope. This hope is the reply Numa receives from the elder in the Greek town in Italy.

The elder tells Numa that a young man named Myscelus was also troubled by a dream. In this dream the hero, Hercules charges Myscelus with a task: to journey out of his hometown, which will forbid him from doing so, and travel to a stream. By that stream Myscelus must build a city. Although the penalty for leaving his home of Argos is death, Myscelus, through Hercules’ intercession, journeys to that stream and founds the city of Crotona.

Crotona eventually nourishes the intellect of the famous philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras: “Although the gods were in the distant skies, / Pythagoras drew near them with his mind; / what nature had denied to human sight, / he saw with his intellect, his mental eye.” In other words, Pythagoras dares to makes sense of the dream through which Ovid has been masterfully guiding us. Though it confounds us, we can, and must, try to understand this mad dream, this world of which we are a part. With our hubris in check, we can take joy in being a part of the world. Nature is a cruel joke, it is true, but it is still a joke. We can weep and turn to stone or we can laugh and soar on wings into the unknown.

After reading Pride and Prejudice, my one real complaint with the book was the aggressively puritanical treatment of romance. While Austen has wit to spare, she conflates sexual promiscuity with selfishness and condemns it with no room for gray areas. While I understand approaching the social stigma of the actions taken by Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and by Maria Bertram Rushworth in Mansfield Park realistically, I cannot excuse the unforgiving villainization of anyone who does not confine their sexuality within the bounds of marriage. While it does not stretch the boundaries of verisimilitude to have a character act in both a sexually promiscuous manner and live in self-absorption-- and even have the latter influence the former-- one cannot excuse Austen for not presenting her more sexual characters with greater compassion, even if it was the norm for her culture. Half of Austen’s appeal is her unremitting satirization of the pomposity of fashionable socialites. Why should there not be room to critique Georgian England’s treatment of sex as well, especially when Lord Byron would do it so well and so thoroughly a mere five years later in Don Juan?

We imagine what kind of stories our lives will make as we live them. Through a combination of Memory and Clairvoyance we piece together what we think will be our story, our Tale. John Crowley weaves just such a Tale, a Tale which his characters constantly and explicitly try to piece together for themselves as it turns towards its conclusion. Just as we all employ the arts of Memory and Clairvoyance, either well or poorly, so do the Drinkwaters and their relatives. There is Great-aunt Nora Cloud, who deals hands from her deck of Least Trumps, discerning the events of the future. Her practice is, however, a murky one, and once the final page is turned and the Tale’s all told, where does it now reside if not entirely in the past? The art by which we and Crowley’s creations organize and understand the past is the one that therefore takes precedence in the novel. At one point another of the characters-- Ariel Hawksquill-- refers to architecture as “frozen Memory.” In the early days of the twentieth century, John Drinkwater builds a house made of Time, the inimitable, tangible example of this notion of Hawksquill’s. As the seasons and generations pass, and Drinkwater’s descendants finally venture into Fairy, they leave only their patriarch’s creation behind so that people will remember.

In Chapter 13 of this book, Klosterman dissects those answers offered by The Matrix, Memento, Vanilla Sky, and Waking Life to the question, “What is reality?” All of these movies follow protagonists whose chief antagonists are their own perceptions of reality, and after a few insights, Klosterman puts forth an answer of his own:

Reality is both reflexive and inflexible. It’s not that we all create our own reality, because we don’t; it’s not that there is no hard reality, because there is. We can’t alter reality-- but reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there. It depends on us as much as we depend on it.

Klosterman’s final claim that, “reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there,” is a shortcoming that plagues many arguments in the book. In another chapter-- “Toby Over Moby”-- he defends the importance of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain, and compares their merit to that of Bob Dylan and Liz Phair, saying that, “they’re less talented, but they understand more people.” Klosterman’s insights throughout the book are not wrong, but they can be stunted. It is true that out perceptions limit us, but we can also track the sophistication of our perception. We bring more of that inflexible reality into focus all the time.

Talented artists help us do this by augmenting our perceptions with their own. By viewing inflexible reality through someone else’s perception we gain little glimpses of the world we may have missed on our own. Klosterman spends much of his time in the book defending artists who remind most people of the reality they already know. At the end of “Toby over Moby,” however, he confesses to having “seventeen Dylan and Phair records and exactly three country records released after 1974.” In the last chapter, “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found,” he tackles Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series. He points out that, despite the many flaws in the fundamentalist Christianity peddled by these books, its followers are “probably the only people openly fighting against America’s insipid Oprah culture-- the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s belief system is valid and that no one can be judged.” Klosterman does not, then, appear to disregard critical inspection of art or of people’s beliefs, but he does come off as worn out by the whole struggle of understanding life and everyone’s contributions to it.

Ultimately Klosterman pulls his book out of the almost nihilistic malaise that threatens to overtake it, even if he does so by the skin of his teeth. He does not abandon the pursuit of insights offered by artists possessing the stature of Bob Dylan, but merit can be found in unlikely places as well. Klosterman finds these moments of clarity wherever he can find them.