Camille Renshaw: Last year in "http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html" target=_blank>an
interview, Courtney Love suggested that new technologies, like
Napster and Gnutella, are a major boon for artists, that they can
“serve the artist and serve the public.” How does technology – new
audio and video mediums, dotcom magazines, the ability to reach
millions internationally instead of a focused thousand – affect your
ideas of what it means to be connected to an audience?

Rick Moody: Just the way the question is phrased makes clear
that most of the innovation is not on the literary front. It’s
obvious that file-sharing software, Napster, Gnutella, are more
focused on populist media right now. The reason they are so popular is
that they arise from a really keen philosophical predicament. Internet
users are experiencing something like a collective consciousness, in
the course of being on the Net, and file-sharing is just a natural
outgrowth of that experience. Copyright seems like an infringement on
a group experience: “Hey, are you digging the new _____ song as much
as I am?” Etc. The inside of your skull becomes a living room into
which you invite your friends, and an intervention on the collectivity
of that consciousness seems like an affront.

But something different happens when you read a book. Reading, by its
nature, is a retreat from collectivity. It’s an intimate act,
conjoining a single writer and reader. This is why writing on the Net,
at any great length, seems a little tiresome, whereas the book, that
old-fashioned data storage technology, can still be VERY LONG and
enticing at the same time. What I’m saying is that I don’t
see new media as necessary or useful by its nature. I see it as useful
according to philosophical needs. The lie of the bull market was that
every technological innovation was necessary. Or that any creative act
that used a digital technology was innovative by its nature.

Meanwhile, I don’t think about the audience aspect of new media
at all. I try to avoid thinking about audience. People can read my
stuff or not read it as suits them. I hope the work is its own
attraction, but I do no pre-formatting in terms of audience. Those may
come who wish to come to the books.

CR: What does “no pre-formatting” mean?

RM: Means pretty much what it looks like it means. I
don’t ask who the reader is, I don’t ask what he or she
wants. I don’t ask whether she is Chilean or he is
wheelchair-bound. I don’t ask whether the reader’s dream
gets broken if I use footnotes, although I might ask whether I can use
them differently from David Wallace. But that’s an aesthetic
question, not focus group sort of a question. I like Don
DeLillo’s answer to this line of inquiry: “I don’t have an
ideal reader, I have a set of standards.” I want to do better at what
I do, for my own satisfaction and self-respect. I’m conscious of
not wanting to completely eliminate the reader from the equation, in
the way that some abstract “experimental” fiction seems to do, but by
the same token, I just don’t worry about them most of the time.
Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes. And they are never in
sight, unless I’m doing a reading someplace.

CR: Blake (who revived the illuminated manuscript in the 1700s)
believed that “the Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution had
denigrated art into a mass commodity. The jarring experience of modern
readers as they read more on screens and less on paper is similar to
the transition made in the 1400s from reading illuminated texts –
quite personal and revealing – to generic printing press texts.
What’s been your experience reading electronically?

RM: I like your metaphor. My experience of reading
electronically has been confined to Web-related reading, excepting a
few CD-ROM artifacts. As I said before, I find the experience really
trying and not satisfying, but I don’t think it has to do with
the “mass commodity” aspect of the Web. Books, after all, are already
mass commodities (as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, among others).
My problem has to do with LCD screens, etc., and whether they are
effective in the matter of text retrieval. My surmise is that they
are, but only in amounts up to about 500 words. After that, I get
bored immediately. Since I imagine that civilization as a whole is
terrified of the long-range stability of writing, this is not a
surprise: that the collectivity of the Web would favor ephemera and
instantaneity over deep, prolonged investigation.

CR: When reading electronically, are you conscious of any
disconnect between yourself and the manuscript/ author?

RM: I feel a little more distant from the author somehow.
That’s merely an intuitive response, however.

CR: My favorite story in Demonology reminds me a bit of
hypertext – maybe that’s why I’ve reread it so many
times. “The Drawer” uses inchworm phrasing to build and build the
story, in a manner both cyclical and seductive in its cryptic style.
Where did this story come from?

RM: Some stuff is almost impossible to qualify, and “Drawer” is
a good example. All I can say about it is that Esquire was
running stories that had to be less than 650 words, and they asked me
to do one, so I did one that was exactly 650 words, including title
(although I think I messed up the number slightly when it was in
galleys for the book). It was all about just taking a word and
performing a sort of archeology on it, which is an exercise very
central to The Black Veil, my next book. Taking words and
figuring out how we use them and what they mean when we do. This
tactic is consistent with the opening of Purple America, in
rhythm and music. But The Black Veil, which is mostly finished,
is all about the word “veil,” what it means, how it gets used, why it
turns up so frequently in English language prose. Like a lot of
writers, I’m fascinated by trying to take words and restore them
to their initial glory as really beautiful names of things. “Veil” is
particularly good since it’s about disclosing and concealing at
the same time. I did the same thing with an essay on “cool” a couple
of years back. Really dug in under the surface to see what was behind
this overused word of youth culture.

I don’t see how this is like hypertext, especially since I was
just reading one of the classics of the form, Patchwork Girl,
by Shelley Jackson. I don’t see any resemblance at all. Although
I find the idea of hypertext very fascinating, and although I really
love Shelley’s work, I still don’t find the actual thing
that compelling.

CR: Is this your first hypertext? What was your experience with
this very different approach to authorial control?

RM: This was the first CD-ROM hypertext novel I’ve read.
Shelley Jackson also has a very interesting piece on the Web, and I
have read other Web-based hypertexts, although some of them were
multi-media. I frankly think the medium favors multi-media. But my
argument has always been that for fiction, hypertext is redundant,
because fiction is already reader-controlled. That’s what
interpretation is. So, while it appears to be a different kind of
authorial control (a more vast, attenuated kind of control), it ends
up, in my view, being the symbolic made actual, and not in a terribly
interesting kind of way. Maybe it will improve in the future, as
people work more with it. But I doubt it. There’s something
about old-fashioned storytelling that makes it simple, flexible, and
attractive, in whichever medium. Hypertext clutters up this narrative
impulse needlessly.

CR: Do you think the heightened influence of technology on our
lives is shaping literature in any significant way?

RM: I can give some concrete examples in my own case. My
tendency to italicize, which is considered one of my very individual
tropes, derives from the moment I first got a word processor. I was
always drawn to italics, but it was a lot harder to do on typewriters.
It required extra movements (holding down the shift key while you
typed, etc.) on the Selectric II, which was my pre-word-processor
tool. So I suppose you could say that the flexibility of MS-Word is
responsible for that, ditto that story of mine “Primary Sources,” the
annotated bibliography. It was made much easier to manage with the
advent of word processing software. I had a discussion with friends
about the cut-and-paste functions in MS-Word, with others arguing that
it makes changes too easy. But I think you just have to build in
reflective time between drafts to account for this. Probably the human
and the technological have been married since writing was first carved
into rock. The first impulse is human, and will always be, but there
are tools that are required, and they are reflected in the work.

Camille Renshaw: Faulkner once wrote, “Art is no part of Southern life… [but] is almost the sum total of a Southern artist.” Do you think writing or art is still somewhat out of place in Southern culture, or is that tension different this century?

Leah Stewart: Currently, I don’t see much difference between living and writing in North Carolina and living and writing in Boston, except that it’s much cheaper to do the living part of it in the South. It doesn’t seem to me that writing and art are out of place in Southern culture; in fact, I’ve always thought of writing in particular as a huge part of it. (And I’m living between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, two towns where there’s all kinds of art and music and writing going on.) It’s in books that you see the version of the South I think he’s talking about here – steeped in its history, especially the Civil War and its legacy of slavery, racism, and separatism. I’m attracted to the Southern gothic sensibility, with all its dark secrets: Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, William Gay. But, on the whole, that’s not the South as I’ve experienced it. The summer I lived in Memphis I felt closer to that version of the South than I have anywhere else; maybe that’s why I set the book there.

I’m not even sure how much I’d identify myself as a Southern writer, not because I wouldn’t like to but because I’m not sure how authentic that claim would be. I’m an Air Force brat; my parents are from Alabama and Tennessee, but I didn’t really live in the South (Fairfax County, VA, is not the kind of South we’re talking about) until entering Vanderbilt. And I don’t have a sense of Nashville as a city trying to hang onto its history. In fact, I was a senior at Vanderbilt before learning about the school’s connection to the Fugitives. It’s not something Vanderbilt plays up, I’m guessing, because of the racism that was part of their worldview.

I’ve moved so much – to the Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast, as well as England – that no particular place seems to me to have shaped my character. I don’t really feel the urgency about place that Faulkner certainly did; no character I created would feel as conflicted as Quentin does about whether he hated the South. He’d just move.

CR: What were you doing the summer you spent in Memphis?

LS: I was interning at The Commercial Appeal, which is the Memphis daily. My job was in the Neighbors department, which is about as far from Crime as you can get, but a friend who was interning in Metro sometimes covered the police beat. She talked about rapes that weren’t making the paper, like the woman assaulted across the street from the apartment where I was living. I was 19. It was the first time I had ever lived alone, and, as in my book, a number of murders were committed in the area that year, mostly men killing young women. So I was scared. One night I burned my finger badly on the stove and was too scared to walk down the block to the convenience store for Neosporin.

But I also really liked Memphis – it had a larger-than-life character unlike any other place I had lived. The city is a place with a strong sense of its own history: Elvis, Al Green, Beale Street, all the colorful Memphis figures the people there like to tell stories about. It really has that Southern gothic flavor we were talking about earlier.

CR: Did Body of a Girl require much research?

LS: For a while the research consisted of long phone conversations with my police beat friend. Then, when I didn’t know a piece of information the story needed, I tended to either work around it or leave myself a note to fix it later. I had a strong reluctance to do any research – sheer laziness, I guess. By the time the draft was finished, it had a lot of those “fix this later” notes. So I was forced to research in earnest and read memoirs by crime reporters. I talked to a Memphis medical examiner, a couple of cops, a nurse. I read a number of articles from the Memphis paper about Graceland, crime, politics, drug use, etc., and used the Internet to research opiates. The main thing I learned about research is that you have to do it – and then find a way to incorporate that knowledge without parading it.

I read a number of literary/mystery books with an eye toward learning something in particular for my novel, like Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn. I also read Edna Buchanan’s books, crime novels narrated by a female cops reporter. And, late in the process, two P. D. James novels were extremely helpful. I had trouble with plot, something no one had ever taught me, and learned from James that when you have a large question driving the narrative, you need to set up and answer a number of other little questions along the way.

CR: How much personal experience went into the book? When I was reading the novel, I had to resist making you the same person – perhaps because your physical descriptions are similar.

LS: The story line is certainly in no way autobiographical. Certain details are, although sometimes Olivia’s reactions are not the same as mine. As for how much of Olivia is me… I’ve been asked that question several times and find it difficult to answer. In the original draft of the first 50 pages, Olivia had all of my own dissatisfaction with being a reporter. Then I realized that if she was uncertain and unhappy on the first page, I had nowhere to take her. She needed a faith in her work and in her own toughness that could be shaken. So I changed her voice, made her talk tough, and added lines like “Murders are my responsibility.” Her fears about crime are my own, although hers take her to a level of obsession mine never have.

I guess the short answer is that she’s not me, she’s Olivia. But I made her.

CR: Your novel is filled with haunting sentences like, “There is something that [Allison] did that I didn’t, and because of that, she is dead. I am alive.” What about these intersections of identity and obsession interests you?

LS: There’s something so big about obsession. Much of daily life is small, but if you have an obsession, you have a great deal of emotion connected to it, and emotion’s where drama comes from. And it’s interesting because it’s fundamentally inexplicable. You can build up theories to explain it – oh, she’s obsessed with that man twice her age because her father was distant, etc., but that’s never quite sufficient. Why that older man and not another one? Most often, the person obsessed can’t even explain it. Michael Caine has a good line in Hannah & Her Sisters: “For all my education, accomplishments, and so-called wisdom, I can’t fathom my own heart.” Psychology has filtered down the idea that everything we do can be explained, but we are all to some degree mysterious, even to ourselves. The way obsession taps into that mystery fascinates me. (But I don’t know why!)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is Annie Dillard’s account of one year spent exploring her own back yard and woods. She follows the seasons, investigating Winter, Spring, Summer, then Fall. Her descriptions of a preying mantis eating her mate during sex, a tree filled with lights, a water bug eating a frog, and grasshoppers becoming locusts are graphic and even horrific. Her examinations of pond water under a microscope are meticulous. Her observations are often scientific and accompanied by remembrances of biological studies or strange bits of relevant information, like the wave particle theory.

This book, however, isn’t foremost concerned with these scientific details. It’s concerned with the act of observation itself. Dillard is teaching us to see. She wants us to be totally immersed in the present, because some day soon “we die and are put in the earth forever” (Jack Gilbert).

It’s difficult to annotate this book without referencing Dillard in every sentence – that’s because she teaches us to observe by opening her own mind and sharing what she’s seen. In particular, the writer reading her narrative can see how her earthy observations translate to philosophy and then to literature. For example:

“The point I want to make about the snakeskin is that, when I found it, it was whole and tied in a knot… The knot had no beginning… Intently, then, I traced the knot’s lump around with a finger: it was continuous. I couldn’t untie it any more than I could untie a doughnut…

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a Slinky…

The power we seek, too, seems to be a continuous loop. I have always been sympathetic with the early notion of a divine power that exists in a particular place, or that travels about over the face of the earth as a man might wander – and when he is “there” he is surely not here. You can shake the hand of the man you meet in the woods; but the spirit seems to roll along like the mythical hoop snake with its tail in its mouth… This is the hoop of flame that shoots the rapids in the creek or spins across the dizzy meadows; this is the arsonist of the sunny woods: catch it if you can.”

The pilgrim shouldn’t stand at a distance from life and dictate an overarching philosophy that finitely pulls all the corners of the world together. In the world’s intricacy there’s chaos. The chaos theory wasn’t public knowledge when this book was written, but Dillard subscribes to the same principles. The Water Words Dictionary defines the chaos theory as: the theory that “any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict its future behavior.” Dillard’s world, built on narrowly defined animal behaviors and an understanding of God, still has unpredictable ends that are often cruel and seemingly “unjust,” but are just as often miraculous. The open-eyed pilgrim will be surprised by life again and again – in one moment someone will eat her mate and in the next a baby will float downstream, on its back, scratching his belly in the sun.

Dillard is clear that nature isn’t the only observatory available for discovering more about nature, God, and ourselves, but I agree with her – it’s my favorite. Her precise accountings of species or bark or bacteria are sometimes a bit boring, but in the end the payoff is big. We see the gothic, yet beautiful, world her bizarre anecdotes and odd facts create only when our full concentration is on the present moment.

In this book she gives the best definition of innocence that I’ve ever read, and I think the maintenance of our innocence is key to the kind of observation the book promotes:

“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.”

Because of this, a good writer cannot stand before a story and say, “so be it.” The story has its own life and its own chaos. We can only stand unself-consciously in it, not above it or near it, and record what we find there. Some common threads will surface of their own accord.

Richard’s strengths are many, including inventive naming, genuinely Southern dialogue, unique phrases, and a sweet, funny sensibility. His reviewers often refer to his O’Conner-like moral sensibility and his Faulkner-esque language, but his innovative use of action as catalyst to character is a call back to Chekhov.

“The Birds for Christmas” is a good example of how his characters’ actions reflect this incisive, yet humane vision without an analytical intrusion from Richard. The story begins with a short paragraph that tells us, in the clear, witty style of Francine Prose, where we are and what the people there want. He describes the hospital and two orphans’ desire to watch “The Birds” during Christmas week on television. Then we learn of their obstacle: the nurse thinks they’re too young and that the program might disrupt the younger children.

Telling us these boys’ struggle to have a decent Christmas isn’t enough. Richard wants us to hear his characters’ voices. One orphan says things like, “Fuck Frosty… I see that a hunrett times. I want to see The Birds, man. I want to see those birds get all up in them people’s hair. That’s some real Christmas TV to me.” We find just enough dialogue to let us know what kind of people we’re dealing with and that at least this ten-year-old’s mouth is suffering from his lack of a mother.

Richard quickly summarizes how sponsors were signing up to take all the orphans on the ward except the narrator and his friend Michael, the last “Big Boys.” They wouldn’t care if they were left on the ward for Christmas if only they received their wishes. The narrator wanted a train set for Christmas and Michael wanted to see “The Birds.” The narrator knows from the beginning that this is too nice a gift to wish for and that he will never receive as much, so he throws in with his friend and wants to see the movie.

In short paragraphs Richard weaves in and out of prior incidents of Michael’s misbehaving at the orphanage and how bold he was in requesting “The Birds” for Christmas. With this background, Richard brings us into the present where the janitor breaks their soundless television, and all possibilities of the orphans’ wish being granted are diminished. Then Richard writes the first long scene.

The next day when Seminary students teach the orphans the Nativity story, the narrator and Michael begin squawking that the angels are birds. They laugh that the shepherds were “sore afraid.” They curse and act out uncontrollably because they no longer have anything to behave for. The characters have a page of dialogue before they are rolled into a linen closet and left there for several hours as punishment. Richard explores this scene so closely because it is the first place where the orphans’ actions and emotions have developed into a weighted frenzy.

Then Richard gives us another quick scene, just eight sentences long. One day during Christmas week, a man named Sammy, once a patient there as a child, shows up drunk as Santa. He goes around to all the beds and asks the patients what their Christmas wishes are. Slowly he becomes more and more melancholy and then blubbering drunk. The janitor “puts him out.”

The final scene is the longest one in the story, although little dialogue is used. On Christmas Eve everyone on the ward has been taken by someone, except the narrator and Michael. They are listless until Sammy shows back up with a portable TV. The narrator writes several times: “It was Christmas, Sammy convinced the night nurse.” The kids are astounded by the surprise, and then by the frightening movie. Michael comments during a commercial, “Those birds messing them people up.” At the end of the movie, Sammy sneaks out a side door, and the orphans bury themselves in bed. The last line reads, “It was Christmas Eve, and we were sore afraid.”

Richard doesn’t comment on his characters’ distress or its impact or elaborate on their motivations. He simply enlightens us through their actions. We know these kids are reputedly bad because of the nurses’ terrible reactions toward them versus other children, but we like them anyway because we know and relate to their deep desires. All children have that one wish at Christmas. And to Richard, who happened to spend much of his youth in these hospitals, the thing that matters most in their young lives is the small mercy, the random act of charity, they receive from a drunk one Christmas.

Mark Richard is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Fishboy and the award winning collection of stories, The Ice at the Bottom of the World, which won the PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. Charity was released in September 1998. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Oxford American, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Annual anthology.

Mark Richard lives in Los Angeles. His name is pronounced in the French manner.

Cornelius (Buddy) Suttree is so displaced in his search for a meaningful purpose that he is content to live among vagrants on the Tennessee River where it cuts through Knoxville’s downtown area. He lives in a rundown houseboat and fishes for a living. Each night he drinks with whatever vagrant the city gives him until he passes out in strange fields or alleys. Occasionally he is arrested for Public Drunkenness. Still he refuses to leave this life, but remains among a strange band of squatters, thieves, drunks, and oddballs, living in filth and poverty. The Knoxville winters are a hardship, and jobs are difficult to find. In the end too many friends die or are sent to prison as a result of this lifestyle, and Suttree moves away to some undetermined city to start anew.

McCarthy flexes his strongest muscles when he writes long, descriptive passages full of irate metaphors and provocative portrayals. Suttree has pages of it. The novel begins with a three page, italicized description of Knoxville’s carnivorous soul:

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city is beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept or what’s the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world’s nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his trade to each?

Place is traditionally important in Southern writing, and McCarthy subverts this tradition when he takes it literally, making Knoxville a character. The weather, the police, mazes of streets, the tram system – anything symbolic of the city – work to control the lives of Suttree and his friends. For example, one summer Suttree is stuck upriver with a young attractive woman during two weeks of torrential rain. They hide under a cliff and make love the whole wait. The day before the rain stops, the water weighs down the soil above them, causing the cliff to collapse on the woman. She’s killed.

McCarthy’s stories take us to a world that merges the real and surreal and renders it with elaborate language, unconventional characters, and violent scenes. He jolts Southern literature out of a state of complacency, asking us such weighty questions as: What is the nature of evil? and What role does memory have in reality? Although I would never describe this book as brief or chiseled, it is precise and illuminating. Suttree will engage your mind and sense of self like few contemporary books from the South.

If you’ve never read any Hempel before, prepare yourself for a different sort of story. Plot bows down before language, and her tangential detail builds in a style similar to Elizabeth Bishop’s. She explores themes by developing collage-like details into vistas from which she makes some final revelation or turn in an unexpected direction. Tumble Home, is a collection of seven short stories and a novella. The short titles sound like answers to a parlor game: “Weekend,” “Church Cancels Cow,” “Sportsman,” “Housewife,” and, of course, “Tumble Home.” The stories are spare, offbeat, poetic – and extremely quotable. In “The Children’s Party,” for example, the baby’s father gives drinks to his guests and says, “This’ll change your handwriting.” “Weekend” is a glimpse of family interaction during a vacation of baseball and picnics: “`It’s not who wins -’ their coach began, and was shouted down by one of the boys, `There’s first and there’s forget it.’” And any quote from “Housewife” is the whole story:

She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”

Not all of Hempel’s stories are so abbreviated though. The 83-page long novella “Tumble Home” is a letter written from a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house to a painter with whom she once had tea. After only a few pages, you’re embarrassed for this woman who emotionally undresses so readily before a stranger. Through a series of interrelated vignettes the narrator’s history with her family, the other patients, and her doctors slowly surfaces, and, subsequently, her self-obsessed psyche. Then the narrator’s inner struggle with suicide gives way to one of Hempel’s favorite themes: displacement due to loss.

From the first story, “Weekend,” where she sets up her ideal of home, to the last, where the narrator is by far the most isolated voice of the collection, Hempel describes the range of forms home can take and how people look for it. In the novella the term “tumble home” is defined as “the place on a ship that is … the widest part of the bow before it narrows to cut through water – it is the point where the water parts and goes to one side of the ship or the other. To me, the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you.”

That these stories bookend her collection is the best indication of the range, and of the excellence, in between.

Read Amy Hempel’s The Harvest in Pif Magazine.

Other work by Amy Hempel: Her first collection of stories, Reasons to Live, was published in 1985. Her second collection, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, appeared six years later. She co-edited Unleashed, a collection of poems by writers’ dogs, with Jim Shepard in 1995.

The Passion creates, not so much a psychological identification with the main characters, Henri and Villanelle, as a loss of traditional bearings through Winterson’s juxtaposition of the mystical and the violent and the psychical, elements linked only by the word passion. The text avoids the cerebral, claiming the existence of webbed feet that walk on water and live women with no hearts in their chests, but the subtext asked questions about language. Where would this book have been without the word passion, its catalyst? Winterson’s story plays on our emotions and explores the roots of human passion. Passion motivates every turn of the plot, every thought her characters have. Would these plot twists have happened or these character’s emotions have been realized if the word passion did not exist?

Technically, this story is brilliant. The title word creates both an emotional framework for the characters and a thematic background. Henri and Villanelle’s voices pace the book, maintaining a tight plot. Winterson’s diction is sparse and dense, such as when Henri describes Napoleon, “But he had furs to keep his blood optimistic.” Her text is moody and emotional. On one page Villanelle writes after making love with her female lover, “I took to going to service twice a day to bask in the assurance of Our Lord & My body loosens then, my mind floats away.” A few pages later her lover goes vacationing with her husband, and Villanelle describes her religion again, “What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim?”

Despite this ingenious technical and thematic setup, I was put off by Winterson’s philosophizing and the repeated phrase, “In between fear and sex, passion is.” My right to ask What is passion? was usurped, and reading the pointed sentence again half a dozen times was aggravating. Too often Winterson tyrannically told me what to think, spouting her life philosophy, instead of respecting me and her narrative enough to allow my own conclusions. As a result, her text did not particularly resonate with me.

Luckily, Winterson wisely chose not to answer The Passion’s subtextual questions directly but allowed her narrative to convince me to answer, Language impresses life and history, and vice versa. The language, the words passion, love, and hate, guide the narrative. I kept wondering, what if none of the characters had these words? It reminded me of George Orwell’s ideas about language in 1984. If we don’t have the words to describe what we sense or feel or desire, we can’t discuss it or demand it. What if Villanelle or Henri could not express the passionate aspects of their emotions and psyche? Would they feel or act the same way? And conversely, without these acts of passion, Napoleon storming into Russia, Henri killing the cook, would history and life be the same? No, passion, life, and history are interdependent.

Moody’s rhapsodic, surging dialogue, the ins and outs of speech with thoughts, with could-have-been-saids with weren’t-saids, adds a third dimension to the character’s interactions. The son has a stuttering problem, adding pause to his lines. The mother has a muscular disorder making nearly any speech impossible. So how do they exchange so many lines of dialogue? Are these thoughts or actual speech?

-What business is it of yours? …Her words like a mush, a consommé of talk. -Can’t you-

-W-w-what? Hex shoves one of his chairs from the breakfast table up next to her. -Ma? If we’re g-g-going to… You’d better start by trying to p-p-

-I don’t ask you …. about…

-Pronounce your words…

-Dunwannapulllshhhhh, somewhat plausibly. The words are onomatopoetic. Perhaps soundalike quality is enough to convey sense.

This hey-what’s-really-going-on-here? dimension at once places you deeper into the story and forces you outside of it.

Through the thoughts and memories of Hex, his mother, stepfather, and Hex’s girlfriend from elementary school, we see a portrait of the family at its best and worst: the love, naiveté, and optimism of Hex’s father (when he was alive) and mother years before, amid the reality of his mother’s debilitating disease and the ramifications of Hex’s alcoholism. Moody uses their voices to juxtapose the way the characters thought their lives would turn out with how they actually did. The voices give us detailed introspections, the mother longs to relive a moment from Hex’s childhood or the stepfather reveals that he never faced the reality of his wife’s disease, and we love the characters for knowing them so well. Their damning present frustrates us, but we trust Moody and ultimately empathize with the feelings and situations of his characters. The joy of the past, of a young family, interweaves with the pain of the present one. The joy and the pain, the past and the present, each is a part of the other.

Simic, even though he is hailed as one of America’s finest contemporary poets, may be virtually unknown to many of you. Born in 1938, he is a native of Yugoslavia who emigrated to America in his teens and currently teaches at the University of New Hampshire. For his poetry and literary translations (Vasko Popa and Slavko Janevski, among others) he has won awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America and has received the Edgar Allan Award, the PEN Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He is best known as the creator of poetic fantasy.

Much of his writing reflects his family’s experiences in World-War II Europe and the frightening similarities of current events in Eastern Europe. As an exile, Simic believes that misfortune, loss, humor, and paradox are commonplace experiences for all men with war-torn homelands. His poems are fresh and startling and serendipitously mix pain and hope.

In The World Doesn’t End, a few poems read like translations, not a good thing, but most use language so precise, so bludgeoning, that my senses (of smell, sight, touch, etc.) are genuinely affected: “My wife is a wild fern with voluptuously trembling leaves” and “In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.” But his great feats, when he makes them, are not with language but intellect. When he tricks your mind into running with the narrator instead of the text. His last lines turn logic on its head and tell something absurd and unexpected. If you haven’t yet, be sure to read Simic. His poems can’t fail to both amuse and provoke you.

Powell’s characters are distinct in nature, but particularly in voice. Simons’ mother, the whiskey-soaked literature professor known to the local black people as “Duchess,” says wittily when the air conditioner goes out, “Honey, when I was little, we didn’t have all this. Just consider we’re going back through Margaret Mitchell’s wind.” Theenie, the temperamental domestic that worked in Simons’ home before Taurus came, speaks in half-English, half-Gullah, “Because iss onliness us here, He roundbunction, in trouble, fallin’ out of buses, ekksetra. All she wont is somebody to keep him right. Even she know that. And Law knows I do, I see enough of that in my own. Somebody got to hep that boy kotch up. He so far ahead he’s behine. Yes he is.” Powell’s use of Gullah, an African-American dialect, is original, humorous, and believable. One of the few versions that’s been done well. It’s Simons’ voice that rings truest, though, “So, it foundly occurred to me plenty was happening. That’s a childhood thing I said, ‘foundly’ for ‘finally.’ The best language is then. I knew a kid that called noses ‘noogs’ and knives ‘niges’ and a term like ‘big deal’ he shorthanded ‘bih-deel boing!’ – very fast with a blow of his fist on something like your head at the terminal sound.”

Edisto was a pungent, luxurious surprise after reading Aliens of Affection. By comparison, Edisto is near perfect. The world-weariness of many of those poor alienated characters was a bit laborious in Aliens, but Simons’ attitudes are so deeply odd for a child that Powell’s text reminded me of Mark Twain’s writings in its attention to the astuteness of children. What saves Simons from being just another emotionally retarded white kid is his Huck Finn perceptiveness. Simons’ keen perception of his world is startlingly fresh because he is a child and considers himself “protégé” to the Duchess.