ebogjonson

lareviewofbooks:

GREGORY LEON MILLER and WALTON MUYUMBA

on the recent work of Percival Everett.

Illustration of Percival Everett © Joe Linton

GREGORY LEON MILLER

Identity Crisis

Percival Everett
Assumption
Graywolf Press, October 2011. 225 pp.

Percival Everett
Erasure
Graywolf Press, October 2011 (orig. 2001). 272 pp.

Over the course of more than 20 books, Percival Everett has produced as rich a body of fiction as just about any contemporary American writer, but mainstream literary recognition has proved elusive. As an African-American writer deeply interested in the American West, and one with an experimentalist bent, he’s certainly no marketer’s dream. His books range so freely — from satire to absurdism, from realism to metafiction — that it’s difficult to get a fix on him. Then again, the same might be said of Cervantes, Sterne, or Twain.

Identity is the bedrock of the rational. Aristotle’s theory of identity holds that each entity has a specific nature. An owl cannot be a monkey; an elevator cannot be a marimba. Destabilize identity and the ground beneath our feet crumbles: We risk falling into madness. It’s no accident that Everett’s two variations on Greek myth, For Her Dark Skin (1990) and Frenzy (1997), bring readers inside the minds of Medea and Dionysus, those avatars of the irrational. Indeed, so thoroughly do his books complicate identity and undermine logic — in terms of both content and form — that they elude critical categories.

Everett’s new book, Assumption, begins as a standard crime novel, though anyone familiar with the author will know it’s unlikely to stay that way. The protagonist, Ogden Walker, a deputy sheriff in remote Plata, New Mexico, likes his job well enough, even if he’s not especially good at it. He’s bothered by the imagined disapproval of his dead father, a black man who didn’t care for police and generally despised white people even though he married one. Ogden’s mother lives nearby and is the only person outside of work who Ogden sees regularly. The narrator remarks, “It was hard for a son to think that his father hated half of him,” underscoring the internal split, or doubling, that becomes clearer as the narrative unfolds. Ogden “deeply love[s]” the New Mexican landscape yet feels “like a failure remaining there,” sensing there was “a life he was not pursuing.” Like many of Everett’s protagonists, Ogden comes to us burdened by the past, by others’ expectations, by accumulated disappointment and stress, and by an ever-sharpening sense of mortality.

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lareviewofbooks:

JOCELYN HEANEY

on teaching in a community college and
the talk about higher education.

Soldier Reading a Book © JoAnn S. Makinano

Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon Books, 2011. 283 pp.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham
The Humanities and the Dream of America
University of Chicago Press, 2011. 256 pp.

Mike wouldn’t sit with his back to the door: “I can never be sure who is on the other side,” he explained. I’d seen this before with my cousin Frankie, a veteran of Vietnam. Once at lunch, Frankie switched chairs so he could face the windows of the quiet Santa Monica café I’d taken him to. Twenty years later, in a junior college classroom, Mike sat next to me in the circle of desks where I’d gathered the students to discuss Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried. Once Mike had a clear view of the front and back doors, we continued.

We were analyzing the oft-anthologized chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” in which O’Brien debunks the simplistic myths of heroism fed to Americans through Westerns and war films, replacing redemptive clichés with his definitions of a true war story: “A true war story makes the stomach believe … shows its absolute allegiance to obscenity and evil.” A character named Mitchell Sanders tells his own “true” war story about a group of soldiers sent on a “listening post” in the mountains where they are eventually driven crazy by the silence, and by their own inability to express their fear. “They can’t joke it away,” Mitchell explains.

“Let’s start with Mitchell’s story of the six-man-patrol,” I said. I glanced at Mike’s book. I couldn’t tell whether he’d read beyond the chapter or opened a page at random. “In five seconds,” he announced, tipping his chin to indicate the back door, “I could be out of this chair, kicking the door down and shooting whoever’s on the other side.” The other students stared at their books or looked at me with expectant, nervous faces. Many of them had brothers, cousins, or friends that had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe Mike was saying something they’d heard before, or voicing things their own loved ones could never say.

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lareviewofbooks:

ALIX OHLIN

on Colson Whitehead and the undead.

Reclaimed Sewer Pipe © Kelly Barrie 2010.
Digital C-Print Courtesy of the artist and Maloney Fine Art.

Colson Whitehead
Zone One
Doubleday, October 2011. 272 pp.

In Zuccotti Park on Halloween, protesters dressed up as zombies in suits, eyes vacant and deranged, fake blood and money dripping from their lips. A directive had been sent from Occupy Wall Street organizers:

Everyone come dressed as a corporate zombie! This means jacket and tie if possible, white face, fake blood, eating Monopoly money, and doing a slow march, so when people come to work on Monday … they see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions.

Oh, the insult of this metaphor — of all the monsters to pick! Zombies aren’t sexy and glamorous like vampires, or changeable and muscular like werewolves. They represent appetite run amok, violence without thought, and total abdication of the individual will. The undead are not just monstrous in their greed, but unreflective in it. You can’t argue with them.

That the corporate zombies on their way to work appreciated the reflected metaphor is, let’s say, unlikely. But the conflation of money and blood in the OWS costumes indicates the severity of the situation — the feeling that economic injustice has grown to a monstrous condition. And though the movement has spread across the country, there is a reason that the occupation started in New York. The city is the beating heart of the crimes under protest, as it is the heart of Colson Whitehead’s satirical zombie novel, Zone One.

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