by Lorrie Moore
She married a career diplomat who was stationed in northeastern Brazil (which was a strategic Allied base in World War II) and then later in Naples, Bern, southern England, and Washington, D.C. Though the life of a diplomat’s wife might seem the perfect one for a writer—did it not work for Mary McCarthy?—with its travels and staff, its only burdens being residence away from home and having to be polite all the time, she chafed both as a dutiful diplomatic wife and, later, as an intellectual among intellectuals. She learned to say “Isn’t that nice” as the former and “I don’t know” as the latter. And although she was initially good at polite appearances, after two decades it all proved a kind of soul-death (freedom versus duty is an early theme in her work). Her private life as a writer was not entirely taken seriously by her husband, and so she left him and with their two sons went back to Brazil, the only country that knew her work, and where her first book, Near to the Wild Heart (drawn largely from her own childhood), had been a critical sensation just before she left.
In many ways, she did not return soon enough for happiness. She arrived in Rio as a divorced, middle-aged woman with two sons, one of whom was schizophrenic. Solitude, social awkwardness, and concern for her son all infected her well-being. She became obsessed with an almost childlike desire “to belong,” and friends were driven away. Brazilian culture in the 1960s was heating up, and everything from bossa nova to political activism made Rio an exciting place to be. But fiction writers could not make a living there. Nonetheless, Lispector resided in a fashionable part of Rio at one end of Ipanema Beach, with a live-in maid. She collected a generous amount of alimony, wrote journalism, ghostwrote a starlet’s glamour column. Also under a pseudonym she became a paid agent of Pond’s, using a beauty advice column to extol the virtues of the company’s skin cream. (There: I’ve buried the lead.)
Lispector’s uncategorizable work causes the reader to mimic her own processes: that is, her sentences are often in search of themselves and are constructed from the very casting about that a reader may undergo in having to find a term that is suitable to describe them. Zadie Smith has proposed “constructive deconstruction” (as opposed to a tradition of “lyrical realism”). I would suggest “epiphanic collage.” (Or on less receptive days, “expressionist journaling.”) The Jewish mysticism that is sometimes attributed to Lispector has much to do with the feeling in her work of chasing after a fleeing God, though her most compelling deity was language in service of the mind’s self—from which language, too, for Lispector, had stepped away and required summoning back. Language, for her, was the self’s light. (Moser never once uses the word narcissism.) She worried it with self-consciousness, like a cat with a slippery mouse:
The great, neutral reality of what I was experiencing outstripped me in its extreme objectivity. I felt unable to be as real as the reality that was reaching me—could I be starting in contortions to be as nakedly real as what I was seeing?
—THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H.
Even in her first book, published when she was nineteen, she was fond of the exquisite abstraction:
The dark, murky night was cut in half, separated into two sombre blocks of sleep. Where was she? Between the two halves, seeing them—the half she had already slept and the half she still had to sleep—isolated in the timeless and in the spaceless, in an empty gap. That interval would be discounted from the years of life.
—NEAR TO THE WILD HEART
Furthermore, her relationship to animals grew increasingly spiritual, taking Spinoza’s pantheism into the heart of both her life (dogs were often her closest friends) and her work. In some of her narratives animals seem a stay against the abyss; other times they reflect that abyss in their eyes, in a manner resembling a destroying lover. She sometimes pits an animal and a person in a dialectic of mutual assassination. She is interested in the complexity of a creature: the eyes of a cockroach; the mute, humid hippopotamus; cats mistaken for suckling pigs. Theirs is a world that sees “no danger in being nude.” One of her finest stories, “The Buffalo,” from her collection Family Ties, takes place in a zoo (its closing notes of love-maddened self-mutilation are reminiscent of the brutal ending in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher). “Careful, Nature thinks” is one of her oft-quoted lines. As is “Do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.”
Lispector reads as a lively intelligence sometimes veering toward hysteria then falling back, as if in a faint, and flattening to aphorism and pronouncement. Psychology and setting by and large remain vague; such modernisms are dispensed with in favor of starkness, tragicomic paralysis, and crying out. She is a postmodernist of some sort, but Moser, perhaps wisely, does not attempt any label at all. He discusses her work in great detail, book after book, with sympathy and insight, and admirably eschews jargon though he underemphasizes her wit. Lispector was terrifically funny, but it seems this is not made much of by anyone writing of her, though it is essential to the vitality of much of her prose. Near to the Wild Heart begins its second paragraph:
Resting her head against the cold, shiny windowpane, she looked into the neighbor’s yard, at the great world of the chickens-that-did-not-know-they-were-about-to-die.
In The Hour of the Star, the narrator announces:
The action of this story will result in my transfiguration into someone else and in my ultimate materialization into an object. Perhaps I might even acquire the sweet tones of the flute and become entwined in a creeper vine.
In The Apple in the Dark, written in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just before she left her marriage, a black humor, conveyed through decrescendo and juxtaposition, is the offsetting fruit:
Ah, she said with simplicity, it’s like this: let’s say someone is screaming and then someone else puts a pillow in their mouth so they don’t have to hear the scream. Because when I take a pill, I don’t hear my scream, I know I’m screaming but I don’t hear it, that’s how it is, she said adjusting her skirt.
Even her letters are witty. Of a negative review, she wrote that that particular critic “acts like the man who beats his wife every day because she must have done something.” From Bern, the land of cuckoo clocks and snow, she wrote her sister, “This Switzerland is a cemetery of sensations.”
* * *
—
If there are other weaknesses in Moser’s biography, they are largely organizational: there are repetitions, as well as subjects that once begun are then dropped. The character and nature of her marriage seem almost completely missing for twenty-two chapters; as is, to a lesser degree, her relationship to her sons. Although we do see her observing her boys and writing down their cute remarks in notebooks, her relationship to mothering veers from being primary to less than secondary and then back again in a flash. Her love life seems to go almost completely out after the fire in her forties, and her lifelong attachment to the handsome gay poet Lucio Cardoso has unexplained hiatuses. Also the smitten translator Gregory Rabassa’s much-reprinted line, that Lispector was “that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” is never questioned for its sexism—i.e., is beauty a contraindication of an intellectual life? Would anyone say this of Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, or Camus? The remark irritated Lispector mostly because she had never read any Woolf.
Moser is impressive, however, in his interest in and take on Brazilian politics. Providing authoritative historical backdrop is his forte. And though Lispector wasn’t especially political, after the military coup of the 1960s she joined in protest with other artists and with young people, with whom she felt like-minded on everything. She clung to young people. The strongly anti-Communist Elizabeth Bishop, on the other hand, seemed to distrust the young and supported the military coup—which may come as a surprise to her admirers.
Moser would like us to see Lispector’s death at fifty-seven of ovarian cancer as a literary symbol—he places it in a metaphorical system of eggs that runs
through Lispector’s work. “The chicken exists so that the egg may traverse the ages,” she wrote in “The Egg and the Chicken (I).” “This is what a mother is for.” But her illness seems less significant as figuration than it does as a disease that disproportionately afflicts Ashkenazi Jewish women. In other words, despite everything, a Jewish death. As was her own mother’s, which Lispector never stopped mourning, and this, according to her latest biographer, more than anything else, informed the long, artful wail of her work.
(2009)
Barack Obama
In 2008 Barack Obama’s new book was Change We Can Believe In, but for most of the reading public all of his books were new, and his early memoir, reissued, had begun to be read widely that same year. Unlike Change We Can Believe In and The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father was not a book about policy. It was written before the politician who wrote the others had even been hatched (hatched as a plan rather than as a creature). Dreams from My Father contains Obama’s most spellbinding writing and was the book most Americans were talking about in 2008. It offers a vulnerable portrait of the boy who became the man even as it underscores that boy’s toughness and makes resilience its theme. First published in 1993, when Obama was thirty-one and selling very few copies (before the bulk of its first printing was then pulped), a signed first edition now sells for five figures or sometimes six. When thinking of Dreams from My Father, it is sometimes hard to banish thoughts of the missed investment opportunity this sixteen-year-late reading involves. For those of you who missed out on this deal, get in line and we will pool our dimes to hire a cheap hypnotist who will rid this from our minds so that we can concentrate on what is more important—or at least more literary.
Dreams from My Father is surely (ironically, via its partially telescoped pacing and its storytelling license generally) one of the truest glimpses into Obama the young man and the young boy. Written when Obama wanted to be a writer (rather than commander in chief) and when he was thinking of readers rather than voters, it offers a candor and vividness one will not see in a more straight-ahead political memoir. There are sex and drugs, but they are completely unsensational. He is matter-of-fact and unself-pitying even if self-pity might be considered a thematic corollary to his subject of identity.
Unlike his later books, which are agendas of hope and reform, Dreams from My Father is less about idealism than about boulders in the road: Does one smash them, climb over them, go around them? Napping or retreating aren’t options. What Obama offers is an intriguing portrait of family restlessness, which afflicted both his parents and his grandfathers as well as Obama himself—a restlessness that caused him not to shy from challenges but to use boredom and frustration and good intentions to step up and over them. In Dreams from My Father, family yarns are unspooled and analyzed, as if they were indeed dreams, with a dream’s strange fleeings and chasings and believable changes. One of the most memorable is of his four-year-old Kenyan father running away with his sister, who was running away to find their mother, who had also run away; it is a heart-stopping tale of African village life. Equally stunning is the stoical story of the Indonesian stepfather, who attempted to toughen the young Barack by boxing him in the face. If one is wondering who this new leader of the Western world really is, Dreams from My Father is the book to read.
(2009)
The Wire
Set in post–September 11 Baltimore, the HBO series The Wire—whose sixty episodes were originally broadcast between June 2002 and March 2008 and are now available on DVD—has many things on its rich and roaming mind, but one of those things is Baltimore itself, home of Edgar Allan Poe, H. L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, and Billie Holiday. Baltimore is not just a stand-in for Western civilization or globalized urban rot or the American inner city now given the cold federal shoulder in the folly-filled war on terror, though it is certainly all these things. Baltimore is also just plain itself, with a very specific cast of characters, dead and alive. Eminences are pointedly referenced in the course of the series: the camera passes over a sign to Babe Ruth’s birthplace, tightens on a Mencken quote sculpted into the office wall of The Baltimore Sun; “Poe” is not just street pronunciation for poor (to the delight of one of The Wire’s screenwriters) but implicitly printed onto one horror-story element of the script; a phrase of Lady Day wafts in as ambient recorded music in a narrative that is scoreless except when the credits are rolling or in the occasional end-of-season montage.
But there are less famous Baltimoreans throughout (local filmmaker John Waters is given an ambiguous shout-out in the final season, and he shouts ambiguously back in the DVD’s bonus features), and all are part of the texture and mythology that The Wire’s producers are putting on display both with anger and with love. The dartboard in a union boss’s office in the series’s second season features a photo of the former owner of the Baltimore Colts, who moved the team to Indianapolis in 1984; scenes shot in Baltimore churches use the actual congregations; real-life hot-dog joints (Pollock Johnny’s!) now reside in The Wire’s televised amber; actual purple-walled soup kitchens and cemeteries and neighborhood corners have acquired mythic status.
More than one former reporter from The Baltimore Sun has written for the show. Baltimore heroin kingpins have cameo appearances, and one, Melvin Williams, who was arrested by producer Ed Burns when Burns was “a police” (as it’s said in Baltimore), is given the role of the Deacon, which he performs arrestingly with lines such as “A good churchman is always up in everybody’s shit. That’s how we do.” The list goes on. Baltimoreans name their pets after the show’s characters. Some former members of the cast still roam the streets, now as celebrities. Young people use characters’ pictures from the show for their own profile photos on Facebook. British tourists come to Baltimore for Wire bus tours. This array of consuming response—domesticating ownership, emotional identification, and devoted pilgrimage—is only part of the very many personal reactions to the show.
The use of Baltimore as a millennial tapestry, in fact, might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success. (“Where in Leave-It-to-Beaver-Land are you taking me?” asks The Wire’s homeless police informant Bubbles, when driven out to a leafy, upscale neighborhood; the words are novelist and screenwriter Richard Price’s and never mind that this aging cultural reference is unlikely to have actually spilled forth from this character; the remark does nicely.)
So confident are Simon and Burns in their enterprise that they have with much justification called the program “not television” but a “novel.” Certainly the series’s creators know what novelists know: that it takes time to transform a social type into a human being, demography into dramaturgy, whether time comes in the form of pages or hours. With time as a medium rather than a constraint one can show a profound and unexpected aspect of a character, and discover what that character might decide to do because of it. With time one can show the surprising interconnections within a chaotic, patchworked metropolis.
It is sometimes difficult to sing the praises of this premier example of a new art form, not just because enthusiastic viewers and cultural studies graduate students have gotten there first—“Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural” or “Stringer Bell’s Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism” (chapters in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television)—but also because David Simon himself, not trusting an audience, and not waiting for posterity, in his own often stirring remarks about the show in print interviews, in public appearances, and in audio commentary on the DVD version, has not just explicated the text to near muteness but jacked the critical rhetoric up very high. He is the show’s most garrulous promoter. In comment after
comment, even the word novel is not always enough, and Simon and his colleagues have compared his five-season series to a Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes are all named), Homer’s Iliad, a Shakespearean drama, a serialized narrative by Dickens, an historical document that will be read in fifty years, a book by Tolstoy, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. This leaves only journalist Joe Klein to raise the ante further: “The Wire never won an Emmy?” Klein is shown exclaiming in the DVD features on the final episode. “The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for Literature!”
“It could have—if we’d done everything wrong—been a cop show,” Simon has said. And in its admirable and unblinking look at a cursed people—America’s largely black and brown urban underclass—it is arguably biblical, Dantesque, and (Masterpiece Theatre be damned) more downstairs than upstairs. Despite Simon’s assertions, however, the series has some origins in legal and police shows such as L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues—not to mention Burns and Simon’s own Emmy-winning The Corner (2000), a rather shapeless precursor (a faux documentary about poverty and drugs in the mostly black neighborhood of West Baltimore, filmed with a handheld camera and a blues soundtrack), as well as Homicide, based on Simon’s own book about the Baltimore Police Department, which ran from 1993 to 1999. The Wire is the polished, mature version of efforts begun before; it is not entirely sui generis but it is beautifully evolved. Nor is the force of the conventional medium entirely absent. Although there are no breaks for commercials, one feels the pressure and shape of an hour imposing itself on each episode, even if the plot of each remains unresolved and the pacing broodingly languorous despite sharp-edged cutting.
