March-April 2003
Books
Touch Wood: Short Stories
By Joe Ashby Porter. Turtle Point Press, 2002. 200 pages. $15.95, paper.
One thing that can be said for the stories in Joe Ashby Porter's new collection, Touch Wood: They jump around. From an author (and Duke English professor) whose first two collections were named for a place (Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Kentucky Stories and Lithuania), those in Touch Wood refuse to be pinned down by locale, whether Key West, Kansas City, or Paris. The shortest story in the collection, "In The Mind," occurs within a narrative dreamscape. The longest, "Scrupulous Amédée" (at fifty pages, vying for novella status), unfolds along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
The locales are not the only aspect of Porter's stories that jump around. The language itself leaps and prances about to the point that the reader must cling tightly to the narrative. Nearly every character offered is unapologetically verbose.
The first paragraph of the story "Icehouse Burgess," about a wandering man who delights in shedding identities as he journeys, reads: "I grew up in a Kansas City icehouse, loving dogs with their furry muzzles when they'd sniff past the ropes and peeling posters of a morning for a wad of sausage casing, or even a handshake in the dank gloom where the duggers and me slung steaming blocks onto the loading platform straw." As the convoluted sentence makes navigation a challenge for the reader, so the protagonist of "Icehouse Burgess" shuns society in search of a personal peace (not unlike Beckett's Molloy). Along with his narrator, Porter is bent on defying any attempts to pigeonhole him or expectations that his style be set in stone.
In the collection's first story, "A Man Wanted To Buy A Cat," take the first sentence: "The man wanted to buy a cat but couldn't because his wife was allergic to it." The protagonist, like a child, wants but he can't. The owner of "a wood working and ski repair shop," he harbors a childish obsession with obtaining a cat glimpsed in the window of a store in town. His desire is made illicit both by his wife's allergy and the cat's presumed unavailability--sitting in the windowsill, it must be the pride of the storeowner. The man imagines building a separate house exclusively for the cat in which he would shower and change clothes in each go-between from cat to wife, as if the pet were his extramarital lover.
His wife, a tolerant woman, indulges her husband's fantasy. Explaining to her children the love that binds her and her husband together, she says, "It won't necessarily be spouse number one, or any spouse for that matter, and given your age (eight) I wouldn't want to lay money on what gender or race it might be, for instance, but trust me, you'll know how lucky you're fortunate enough to be if it does eventually happen to you." Reassuring advice. The author never misses a chance to let us know we live in a wonderfully diverse and always diversifying nation (the flip side of the refusal to be pigeonholed is the right to be awash in the plethora of ways to be).
At last, the man confronts the cat's owner, a lonely spinster. She details for him the sad demise of her last pet, a turtle, whose decaying shell she let sit in her house for a year. Like the rest of the story, their dialogue reads as zany and artificial. "I suppose you dated other carrottops first," the cat owner says, referring to the man's red-headed wife. "I generally think of carrottops as green," responds the husband.
The discussion takes up the mantle of the love/desire dialectic. Love, presumes the cat owner, takes a back seat to desire. Of her relationship with the pet turtle, the spinster concludes, "It had to croak for me to miss its company." The man takes pity on her and returns to his wife, leaving the old woman to the cat and her belittled sense of love. Because she loves her husband, the man's wife buys him a rabbit, which he learns to love as his Love's gift; everyone is happy at story's end. "True love, man-to-man," the father tells his son, "is money in a bank."
The channeling of excess desire or energy figures prominently in Porter's collection. "Scrupulous Amédée" examines a husband's inability to be monogamous. "In The Mind," a somewhat pat parable for artistic consciousness, depicts the surrealistic voyage of a young man apart, who finds it his "duty to inspect a mind," a tunnel system beneath the ground in which clusters of deformed men attempt to entertain one another.
The central story, "Touch Wood," consists of three fragments, two vignettes sandwiching a meta-fictional warning to those who would dismiss fiction as meaningless to the arc of their lives. The most straightforward of Porter's collection in style, if not in thrust, the tale is cinched together with skill and delicacy and without the cloying tendencies of other stories in the collection.
Porter's characters are unable to love in a conventional manner. Rather than solving their restlessness, their anxiety, their desire to seek affirmation outside themselves, Porter's style shares their manic bent toward inventiveness and thereby seeks to validate it. In "The Pear-Shaped Lady And The Fuddy-Duddy," the protagonists described in the title listen to an instructor explicate the essence of character investigation for her seminar on the subject, which, not coincidentally, is Porter's primary concern as well: "Character partakes of the ineffable, so that we can only compare notes within reason and, though your victory may not appear, still you may always outstrip anyone, including of course yourself."
--Jeff Price
Price, who has reviewed books for The Addison Independent in Middlebury, Vermont, lives in Los Angeles.
Yearning For the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place
By John Warfield Simpson M.F. '86.
Pantheon Books, 2002. 281 pages. $24.
John Warfield Simpson is an explorer, although the unknown he searches out is in our minds, below-the-surface thoughts, in the bedrock of our being--the link between person and place. What, he asks, is our connection to the land? And what have we as urban Americans lost in the weakening of that connection, in leaving the Old World for the New? In retracing the immigration journey of the great conservationist John Muir, from his homeland along the North Sea Coast in Scotland to the Wisconsin marshlands, as well as his own, similar journey, Simpson reflects on the meaning of place.
How to Avoid the Mommy Trap: A Roadmap for Sharing Parenting and Making It Work
By Julie Shields J.D. '90. Capital Books, Inc. 2002. 288 pages. $26.95.
Shields is a mother. But she is other things, too. She is an attorney and she wrote this book, which means she's found a way to balance her new life. After dozens of interviews with marital counselors, childcare workers, negotiation experts, employers, child-development experts, and lots of parents, Shields discovered that the happiest families are the ones who share parenting responsibilities. Though she acknowledges that, like many new mothers, she initially took on more duties than she ever expected, eventually she took a step back. Her book, endorsed by Susan Estrich, acclaimed author of the Los Angeles Times' bestseller Sex and Power, and former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, explains the process of negotiating, planning, and creating the personalized work and parenting arrangements that allow new mothers a life outside the world of "mommy."
Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde
By Gennifer S. Weisenfeld. University of California Press, 2002. 368 pages. $55.
On August 28, 1923, forty angry Japanese artists stood outside the Takenodai Exhibition Hall in Tokyo heaving rocks at the glass building. Their unconventional works had been rejected for the Nika Art Association's tenth annual exhibition. The artists rejected the rejection. Mavo, as they called themselves, sought to redefine Japanese art and, in so doing, waged war on the state's traditional notions of what is normal and what is perverse. They sought to reintegrate art into the everyday experience, conveying, through allusions to mechanical environments and abstract imagery, the feelings of crisis, peril, and uncertainty that were beginning to characterize daily life. With acute attention to historical conditions and to the political and social norms of the day, Weisenfeld, a Duke professor of anthropology, captures in sharp relief this iconoclastic fervor and its lasting reverberations in Japanese art and society.
A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka
Edited by James Rolleston. Camden House, 2002. 347 pages. $75.
Franz Kafka was a deep thinker. And his stories can be hard to make sense of. Things are implied, not told. There is much imagery and little dialogue. There are layers of meaning. A story may begin in the middle and end at the beginning--or not all (Kafka never completed a novel). As one critic contends, his protagonists have, in a sense, already died before the story begins. These are the sorts of things that a literary guide lets you in on; in A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, Rolleston, Duke professor of German, and thirteen other Kafka scholars, contribute their insights and arguments to exploring who Kafka was, why he wrote, and what it meant. All present a strong point of view while taking into account previous Kafka research.
The Argentina Reader:History, Culture, Politics
Edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo. Duke University Press, 2002. 580 pages. $23.95, paper.
Now, as never before, this land of incongruent parts and contradictory images-- incomplete, exceptional, and baffling--invites an exploration of the history, culture, and political landscapes that have forged one of the world's greatest enigmas. With a collection of songs, articles, comic strips, essays, poems, and short stories, The Argentina Reader--the latest in a series published by Duke University Press, along with The Peru Reader, The Brazil Reader, and The Mexico Reader--offers a compass for navigating the complexities of the nation through the voices of its own poets, writers, social figures, and political leaders. Editor Nouzeilles is a Duke professor of Romance studies.