Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland: January 27, 2000, Icon

I was so excited to have an opportunity to interview Douglas Coupland. It turned out to be one of the more unusual experiences I have ever had with an author. The phone interview, as I recall, got rescheduled because of a hiccup in his travel schedule. During the interview itself, he told me a story in response to one of my questions…but said it wasn’t for publication. It was a shocking and moving story, and to this day, I don’t know if it was true. (This hole in the publishable material from the interview may account for the excess of plot description in the piece.)

He also told me how little he liked media escorts, and I found myself volunteering to ferry him around when he was in Iowa City. It was my pleasure to do so. He encouraged my own writing (all that time ago, I was working on the little project that I hope to be finishing reasonably soon), we went antiquing and book shopping, we had an odd stop at McDonald’s, and I made sure he got settled into the Iowa City Sheraton prior to his reading at Prairie Lights. I believe he called the hotel “the worst hotel in North America” in his blog. I was both disappointed and relieved not to earn a mention in the blog.

This review ran under the headline and subhead “Dreams of flood and fame: The guy who invented Generation X graduates from ‘parlor tricks’ to latest novel.”

Douglas Coupland has only set foot in Iowa Cithy once. During the summer of 1993, he gave a reading at Prairie Lights as part of a tour to support his second novel, Shampoo Planet.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘We’re really sorry about the flood,'” Coupland recalled in a phone interview. “How can you be sorry about a flood? If you’d actually broken the dam, then I would understand.”

That infamous flood made quite an impression on the Vancouver native, best known as the man who named a generation with his 1991 novel, Generation X.

“You know how we’ve all seen tens of thousands of hours of TV and yet we don’t dream TV?” Coupland asked. “Well, I’ve only seen that one flood–I particularly remember riding past a grassy area where the water was just about over the r0ad–and I’ve had hundreds of dreams about it.”

Coupland is returning to Prairie Lights to read from his latest novel, Miss Wyoming, a book that hinges on a quite different sort of dream. The story focuses on 27-year-old Susan Colgate, a former beauty queen and washed-up TV actress, and John Johnson, a 37-year-old hotshot movie producer. Much of the back story for the two characters is developed in a series of flashbacks interwoven with the “here and now” action of the book.

Both Susan and John, for very different reasons, have spent a period of their lives detached from the worlds they usually inhabit. Susan dropped out of sight after a plane crash from whcih only she walked away. She allowed the world to believe she had been killed in the crash and she set out to recreate her life.

John embarked on an ill-considered walk out of Hollywood and into the American landscape after recovering from an illness reminiscent of those he suffered as a sickly child. Far from the romantic wanderings of a Jack Kerouac character, John’s journey was marked by hardship and ended with him in the hospital where he had a near-death experience featuring Susan Colgate, whom he doesn’t recognize but whose voice was the last he heard on his room’s television set before he slipped away.

Susan and John have resumed lives reminiscent of, though fundamentally altered from, those they lived prior to their disappearances when they happen to meet at a restaurant. They form an immediate and powerful connection that is threatened when Susan disappears again just hours after they’ve me, leading John to embark on an extremely high-tech search for her.

In the flashback portions of the narrative, Coupland introduces us to a variety of characters who have influenced the lives of the two main characters. Most notable is Susan’s domineering and manipulative stage-mother, Marilyn, whose one desire was to see Susan climb to the top of the beauty pageant ladder. Among myriad other machinations, Marilyn moved her family to Wyoming so Susan would face less competition in her quest for a state crown. While that incident gives the novel its title and seems to highlight Susan’s story, John’s tale is equally central to the narrative and to its happy, if provisional, ride-into-the-sunset ending.

Miss Wyoming is Coupland’s first novel for Pantheon. He left HarperCollins after realizing that his fiction writing “wasn’t a parlor trick anymore.”

“My editor (at HarperCollins) was great but she was an acquisitions editor,” Coupland explained. “My books went from the laptop to Barnes and Noble almost untouched.”

The folks at Pantheon have been a bit more demanding, encouraging Coupland, who was a sculptor prior to writing Generation X, to work on some of the technical aspects of his writing.

“It was like living in East Berlin and then the Wall comes down and you’re allowed to see your Secret Police file and all the things your neighbors have been saying about you,” Coupland joked. “I discovered I’d been making mistakes with things like point of view and tense that if I’d ever taken English 101 I wouldn’t have made. I thought, ‘After six books, I’m still doing this?'”

The actual composition of Miss Wyoming was a departure for Coupland, as well. Until recently, he has been an obsessive note-take looking for emergent patterns and themes by cutting up his notes into individual pieces to construct “quilts made linear.” He abandoned that method for the current book, writing Miss Wyoming start to finish with no notes at all.

While the reader may not notice any great change in Coupland’s characteristic style, his sincere commitment to growth as a writer ensures that he will remain the leading voice in Gen. X literature–a position in which he is somewhat surprised to find himself.

“I’m convinced there’s this parallel universe,” he said, “where I’m the night clerk at the Ramada and I’m thinking, ‘There’s something I should be doing.'”

The Coupland of this universe is anxious to get started on the next book a tale of an unraveling family, the kind of family Coupland thinks most everyone will recognize.

“I’m thinking of calling it, Everyone’s Family is Psychotic,” he said. “Of course, then I’d have to explain to my mom that I mean it in a nice way.”

The Fishermen, Hans Kirk: January 20, 2000, Icon

UI law professor Marc Linder translated several Danish novels, and I think I may have reviewed all of them, beginning with this one. Because the portrayal of the religious in fiction is a particular interest of mine, I found this book rather fascinating. I always enjoyed interviewing Linder (though we never talked about this cleverly titled book featuring his legal research).

This review ran under the headline and subhead “The Great Danish Novel: Classic Danish novel finally finds its way into English thanks to a Hawkeye law professor.”

This spring, University of Iowa law professor Marc Linder was walking by his bookcase when an old birthday present caught his eye. The present was Danish novelist Hans Kirk’s The Fishermen, given to Linder back in 1975 while he was teaching in Denmark. Linder’s initial reaction to the book, the best-selling Danish novel of all time, wasn’t very positive.

“I read about 50 pages and I thought, ‘What is this? I’m not interested in these religious freaks,'” Linder said in a phone interview.

A year later, however, Linder gave the book a second look and his entire perception of the work changed–from distaste to what he calls, “fanatic passion.” Part of that passion was a desire to translate the book, written in 1928, into English. An English translation had never seen the light of day for a variety of reasons, not the least of which many have been Kirk’s membership in the Danish Communist Party.

Linder made some preliminary inquiries to Penguin Books, the company that had originally obtained the rights for an English edition but had never actually produced the book. Though a translation was evidently prepared in the late ’40s or early ’50s, Penguin never released it. Linder had no success getting information about the status of the rights when he contacted the publishing house in the ’70s.

“Evidently, I was not resourceful or persistent enough,” he said. “I couldn’t get anyone’s attention there.”

So the translation was put aside and Linder headed to law school. For the past decade he has taught labor law at the UI, and while he completed a couple translations of German fiction, The Fishermen languished on his shelf.

Until that day in March

“I was walking by my bookcase and there was the book,” Linder remembered. “I said to myself, ‘There’s a loose end in your life.'”

He began a translation of the work and once again set out to unravel the mystery of who controlled the English rights. A phone call to Tina Nunnally, herself a translator of Danish books through her Seattle-based company Fjord Press, led to a new contact at Penguin. Eventually Linder confirmed with a rights manager at Penguin that the company no longer held the rights to the book. Linder contacted the Danish publisher and at long last–“It evidently wasn’t important enough for them to expedite it,” Linder said–gained the English rights to the book.

He spent the summer of 1999 translating the book, revising his work more than 20 times and putting in as many as 16 hours a day.

“You can’t lavish this kind of attention on a translation if you’re doing this for a living,” Linder said.

Among the many challenges to overcome was how to deal with the dialect spoken by the fishermen. “It’s not like a southern accent,” Linder explained. “It’s a dialect; it’s like another language. You can’t reproduce that.”

Linder also searched out a professor in St. Paul, Minn., who translates hymns, a Danish/English Bible on the Internet, and the help of several native Danish speakers in an effort to accurately present Kirk’s work in English. Readers of excellent literature should be profoundly grateful.

As you might guess, The Fishermen tells the story of a group of fishermen who move from the North Sea coast of Denmark to the west coast in an effort to improve their lot in life. There, the transplanted families must adjust to a new lifestyle while struggling to remain faithful to the pietistic form of Christianity.

Kirk (1898-1962) himself was far from being a member of the Church Association for the Inner Mission, the movement to which his characters belong. “He was a godless Marxist,” Linder said. “There’s no doubt about that.” Nevertheless, the beauty of the book is it sympathetic portrait of the fishermen and their wives and children. Indeed, according to Linder, even member of the Inner Mission find that the book casts them in a fairly favorable light.

“Although Kirk was someone with very decided political views,” Linder explained, “he had a very deft hand for drawing characters.”

A prime example of Kirk’s gift is the character Tea Ron, a woman desperately devoted to her religion but also blind to her own self-righteousness. Tea is confronted by the local pastor when her daughter Tabita becomes pregnant out of wedlock. At first humble and ashamed, Tea quickly comes to regard the pastor’s condemnation of her daughter and of herself as too strong to allow. Tea’s subtle shift from a rigid legalist to a more compassionate soul is one of the most effective passages in a novel made up of exceptionally moving moments.

It is rare to find a novel that so carefully examines the lives of people of faith and their struggle to live by that faith as mores and morals change over time. Kirk avoided the snare of condescension that often trips up non-beleiving writers who tackle questions of religion. Kirk’s fishermen may never see God, but neither are they made to look like fools for believing in God. Rather, The Fisherman offers the reader a moving tale of true faith facing growing challenges both from within and without.

Books about the end of the world, January 20, 2000, Icon

If things had gone wrong, this piece never would have been published. See, I was asked to do a roundup of books dealing with the end of the world for a December issue as part of the run-up to the potential disaster of Y2K. The piece didn’t make it into a December issue, however. Fortunately (whew!), the world didn’t end, and the folks at Icon asked me to rewrite the lede so it could be published in January. By then, the urgency was gone, so the piece didn’t even run until January 20.

Dirty little secret: I’d only read some of the books in this roundup: the Dick, the King (long version), and the Gaiman/Pratchett. I have no idea on what grounds I suggested that the Keller book was “surprisingly readable.” Oh, well. It wasn’t the end of the world.

This piece ran under the headline and subhead “Waiting for the end of the world: Doomsday books to read as we venture into the next millennium.”

OK, so the start of the year 2000 turned out to be the biggest non-event on record. After months of build up, the world neither ended nor experienced great degrees of chaos. Instead, celebrations worldwide went off without a hitch, leaving doomsday  fanatics a bit disillusioned and wondering what to do next. For those still seeking some apocalyptic excitement, here are a few suggestions that might fill that empty feeling left by the Y2K rollover.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute–A Cold War classic, Shute’s 1957 novel tells the story of a group of men and women in Australia patiently waiting for the nuclear fallout from a distant confrontation to come and kill them. Refusing to let panic ruin what is left of their lives, Shute’s characters continue to live and love until the deadly rains approach the continent–either an example of the triumph of the human spirit or an example at how stress detaches folks from reality, depending on your point of view.

Dr. Bloodmoney by Phillip K. Dick–Subtitled  How We Got Along After the Bomb, Dick’s 1965 novel also follows the lives of nuclear war survivors. Full of classic Dickian themes and plot points–including the handyman who saves the girl with her twin brother growing inside her and the world–Dr. Bloodmoney, like Dick’s better known works  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, establishes the late author as one of the more creative and daring of American writers.

End of the Age by Pat Robertson–Perhaps a nuclear war isn’t all we have to fear. Indeed the back cover of Robertson’s 1996 novel announces, “Pat Robertson and Hollywood agree–the sudden impact of a meteor will usher in Armageddon.” Robertson, erstwhile presidential candidate and host of the Christian television program “The 700 Club,” draws on the biblical book of Revelation to weave a tale of the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ.

The Left Behind Series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins–Also drawing on biblical prophecy, this widely popular series, which has been dubbed “King James Bond” by  Civilization magazine, tells the story of the Tribulation, a seven-year period following the Rapture of Christians and preceding the return of Christ. Who would have thought the Anti-Christ would earn People magazines’ “Sexiest Man Alive” moniker? A companion series for children is also available, providing apocalyptic thrills for the whole family.

The Stand by Stephen King–A worldwide plague sparked by a computer error leaves the Earth’s population devastated and sets the stage for an epic battle between good, represented by 108-year-old Mother Abagail, and evil, in the person of Randall Flagg. Originally published in 1978, The Stand was reissued in 1990 with more than 150,000 words restored to the text, giving today’s reader the choice between the author’s original 1,100-page vision and the somewhat smaller edited version. Either provides readers with a heap of King’s standard scary fare.

Portent by James Herbert–Following the appearance of strange lights that seem to emanate from the very heart of the Earth, the planet is wracked by as series of horrible natural disasters in Herbert’s 1992 novel. As the death count mounts, climatologist James Rivers discovers there is more behind the upheaval than really bad weather.

The Millennium Quartet by Charles Grant–Best known for penning the “X-Files” novels, Grant embarked on a four-book look at the end of the world in 1997. The first book in the series, Symphony, introduces the reader to Casey, a small-town preacher thrust into the battle against evil when he discovers he can perform miracles. In the Mood, published in 1998, tells the story of John, a man who can sense violence and prevent it. Two more Horseman of the Apocalypse (Death and Famine are treated in the first two books) await Grant’s pen.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett–The acclaimed author of The Sandman graphic novels and the mind behind the Discworld series that came together in 1990 to pen this hilarious novel that opens with the caveat: “Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be  dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.” The Anti-Christ has been misplaced, it turns out, and the rush toward the end of the world becomes a cosmic battle to set things straight.

Apocalypse Wow! by James Finn Garner–The man who brought us Politically Correct Bedtime Stories turns his attention to the apocalypse in this “Memoir for the End of Time.” Take the Doomsday Final Exam, read up on cephlomancy, tyromancy, and scarpomancy, and have “Fun with Fundamentalism” in this irreverent look at all things apocalyptic.

Apocalypse Now and Then by Catherine Keller–Billed as “A Feminist Guide to the End of the World,” this scholarly endeavor traces “how the myth of the apocalypse has shaped our basic habits of text, time, place, community, and gender.” Surprisingly readable, the book focuses on the cultural repercussions of biblical exegesis.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, January 13, 2000, Icon

What I remember best about reviewing this book is the heft of it in my hand, its odd texture and odor, and my relief at how bad the “Juvenilia” section turned out to be. I hardly felt qualified to offer up criticism on the work of Evelyn Waugh, but the editors of this collection did me a tremendous favor. I particularly like phrase,”which are at least gathered together where they can be easily ignored.”

This review ran under the headline and subhead “Complete Waugh a little too complete: New volume of Evelyn Waugh’s work even includes stories the author wrote as a child.”

At its best, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, published this fall by Little, Brown and Company as part of its Back Bay imprint’s repackaging of Waugh’s novels, delights the reader with the sharp satire and crisp writing to which fans of the late English author’s works are accustomed. At its worst, the collection offers up extremely early stories and sketches that most readers would have happily had left out of the book.

Bright spots in the collection, and there are many, include “The Man Who Licked Dickens,” “An Englishman’s Home,” and “Scott-King’s Modern Europe.” The last is in many ways similar to Waugh’s wonderful novel, Scoop, in which a freelance garden writer for a London paper quite amazingly finds himself chief war correspondent reporting on a bizarre war in Africa. The title character in “Scott-King’s Modern Europe” is a scholar whose life work deals with a hopelessly obscure country. The story traces his adventures after he accepts an invitation to visit the country to celebrate the work of the long-dead writer. In both the novel and story, Waugh’s gift for satire shines through as he relates the bizarre customs and labyrinthine bureaucracies of the counties in which the main characters find themselves.

Two chapters from the unfinished novel Work Suspended are another high point. Titled “My Father’s House” and “Lucy Simmonds,” the chapters begin the story  of a successful mystery writer whose work comes to a halt upon the death of his father. In the second chapter he falls in love with Lucy Simmonds, the pregnant wife of a writer friend–he also comes face to face, in a number of bizarre settings, with the man responsible for his father’s death. The opening paragraphs of the first chapter set a wry tone: “In three weeks I should pack (my latest novel) up for the typist, perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse.” But the two chapters are full of poignant moments as well, particularly after the birth of Lucy’s child.

The chapters are quite successful and one wonders why Waugh abandoned the project. Unfortunately, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is devoid of quality notes. While the book does contain bibliographic information about the stories, the book’s introduction is scanty and does not address the stories in any detail.

Readers unfamiliar with the social and political landscape of the England Waugh describes may also struggle with some of the stories, including “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays,” which provides a glimpse into the early days of the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most famous book. The story revolves around the internal politics of the student body at Ryder’s school, and the American reader of the late 20th century may not be armed with the necessary knowledge of such a school’s hierarchy to glean all the piece offers. The story that opens the collection, “The Balance,” offers similar challenges, as well as an unusual narrative style that might put off readers not familiar with the bulk of Waugh’s work.

The reader is not left entirely without signposts, however, as there are a couple of divisions made in the text. The first section of the book, which contains the stories mentioned above, is labeled “The stories of Evelyn Waugh,” followed by sections called “Juvenilia” and “Oxford Stories.” While the stories in the last section may be of some passing interest to devoted fans of Waugh’s work, the juvenilia section might have been better left out. It contains stories Waugh wrote as a child and preserves not only the text of those stories but of all the various writing errors a young author makes. Witness this first chapter of “The Curse of the Horse Race”:

“I bet you 500 pounds I’ll win. The speaker was Rupert a man of about 25 he had a dark busy mistarsh and flashing eyes.

I shouldn’t trust to much on your horse said Tom for ineed he had not the sum to spear.

The race was to take place at ten the following moring.”

These stories offer little to the casual reader of Waugh’s work; indeed, it is difficult to see what they offer any reader save, perhaps, the most serious of Waugh scholars. Though the collection would have been less “complete” without them, it would have been more consistently enjoyable.

Aside from these pieces, which are at least gathered together where they can easily be ignored, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh brings together an assortment of fine writing by one of Britain’s top talents of this century. Fans of Waugh, as well as all those who enjoy deftly constructed satire, will be pleased with the collection.

Next, Marian Salzman & Ira Matathia: December 30, 1999, Icon

The Y2K bug loomed and Prince’s 1999 was exceptionally relevant. But Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia were looking well beyond the coming weeks. Interesting to look back on their ideas now. These predictions, of course, were made before 9/11, Facebook, and the iPhone, among many other changes and innovations.

The authors published a follow up–which I have not read–in 2006. The website listed in this article is now operated by a different futurist all together.

This review ran under the headline and subhead “The end is only the beginning: An advertiser’s crystal ball, ‘Next’ shows us where the world is headed from here.”

Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman are not your ordinary prophets. You won’t find either one shouting out dire warnings to a sinful world, nor will either claim divine knowledge. What they do claim, however, is to have their fingers on the pulse of the world, and their book, Next: Trends for the Near-Future, translates that pulse into a series of predictions about the next five to 10 years.

Matathia and Salzman are “futurists” for Yound & Rubicam Inc., one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. As such, their job–and the job of their colleagues around the globe–is to analyze current trends and extrapolate how those trends will play out in the future. And while the main purpose of their endeavor is to give marketers a leg up as they develop pitches for tomorrow’s consumers, Next makes fascinating reading even if the science of selling isn’t your niche.

Early chapters in the book deal with emerging political trends around the world, including the seemingly inevitable rise of the United States of Europe and sweeping changes in Asia, a continent largely free from its history of foreign domination. The authors are quick to condemn American isolationism in the face of these global changes, arguing that the American economy will become increasingly intertwined with world markets in the 21st century.

From this economic and political starting point, Next branches out to consider upcoming changes in our lives as a result of technological advances, a “global culture swap,” and new takes on spirituality and religion. For example, Matathia and Salzman argue that the psychological “new beginning” offered by the start of the next millennium will lead to an increased focus on individual purification on both a physical and spiritual level. They predict changes in the way we view our bodies and spirits and anticipate everything from increased reliance on “miracle drugs,” like Viagra and Prozac, to an overwhelming demand for “pure products” produced with limited impact on the environment.

Changes in our love lives are on the horizon, as well, say Matathia and Salzman. The Internet is already changing the way many people think about intimacy and sex, and other technologies are on the way that may reinvent courtship rituals. For example, the authors cite a proposed “singles chip” from Philips Electronics that would take much of the guesswork out of the singles scene. A tiny chip, worn as an earring or tie pin, could be programmed with detailed information about he wearer. The chip would then scan a room looking for another chip with “compatible” information. Once identified, the chips would beep in recognition and let the new lovebirds take it from there.

These examples only scratch the surface as the authors go on to consider everything from the future of architecture to the destiny of sports and other forms of mass entertainment. From new ways to “office” to new forms of money, Matathia and Salzman take a considered look at every aspect of life in every corner of the globe in the near future.

As is befitting a book of this sort, Next is a continually evolving work that is not confined to the pages of the text. Updates on the trends studied in the book can be found at http://www.nowandnext.com. In addition to “Updated Trend Snacks,” the website offers excerpts from the book, reviews and press material, and a contact feature allowing visitors to interact with Young & Rubicam’s Brand Futures Group of which Matathia and Salzman are a part.

Occasionally, Next gets bogged down in the recitation of statistical data–“The Greenfield study also found that 38 percent of cyber-sitziens prefer to use a catalog, while 70 percent use a local store, and 75 percent shop at a mall. Just 18 percent of cyber-citizens buy clothing online, but that’s not very different from the 22 percent who purchase through a catalog. In contrast, 66 percent buy at a local store and 68 percent buy at a mall.”–and the authors’ admitted rush to get the text ready for publication leads to some redundancies and confusingly written passages. These are, however, small prices to pay for this fascinating glimpse at who we are now and who we may become in the coming days. Next also gives consumers an inside look at what the marketers know about us and how they may plan to make use of that knowledge as they seek to both follow and influence future trends.

The Driftless Zone & Billy Verite, Rick Harsch: November 24, 1999, Icon

Well, this was an odd one. The books were odd and the author was odd. I told part of the story in the review itself, but I left out the part where he lifted his shirt to show me the scar from a major surgery, as well as what he wrote in my books. I don’t remember exactly how my wife came up, but I suspect I mentioned that the books wouldn’t be her kind of thing. And so he inscribed both books to her:

In The Driftless Zone: “Save this book, please, but don’t read the sausage scene.”

In Billy Verite: “Torch this f***ing book, got it?” (Obscenity obscured because my nearly 14-year-old is helping me with the retyping of the reviews and I like to fool myself about what he has and hasn’t been exposed to.)

I’ve never sought out the third book in the trilogy. But having revisited this review, I just might.

This review ran under the headline and subhead: “Keeping tabs on the Sneering Brunette: Rick Harsch’s novels center around a La Crosse populated by desperate, freakish people.”

When I called Rick Harsch to set up an interview to talk about the first two novels of this “La Crosse” trilogy, The Driftless Zone and Billy Verite, he seemed more excited that I would be there around lunch time than about the book themselves.

“Can you eat hot food?” the 1995 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop asked me.

I assured him that I could, thinking perhaps Mexican would be the order of the day. Instead, Harsch promised me Indian food. And he delivered.

I het Harsch at his Oskaloosa apartment where he had chicken in a rd pepper sauce on the stove and a generous supply of rice on the counter. His wife, who is Indian and from whom Harsch left La Crosse, Wis., so that she could her loal job, was out of town, which meant no vegetables were on the menu–“She cooks the vegetables,” Harsch explained. But there was plenty of food and plenty of water to cool my mouth.

Harsch is a fantastic cook. He may also be a great writer.

Why the hedging? Because neither The Driftless Zone nor Billy Verite are easy reads. The Driftless Zone in particular can be hard to follow as Harsch relates the story of a man named Spleen and his attempt to survive day-to-day in a world filled with characters known only as The Sneering Brunette, The Fag with no Eyebrows, and the like. Sometimes the inattentive reader may lose the thread of what’s going on in the story. Sometimes the attentive reader might, too.

“To my mind,” said Harsch, “the plot is never the most important thing.”

Instead, he told me, his books are an attempt to reflect the time and place in which we live.

“One way I look at the books is as an excuse to explore everyday life in the empire of our times…. The United States is the empire of the 20th century,” he said. “This is the empire and empires are almost always horrifying monolithic machines…. I write about what it’s like to be living day to day in the midst of enormous prosperity and enormous vacuity.”

Certainly, the sense that something is wrong in the world fairly screams off the pages of these two books. Populated by desperate, freakish people–the narrator recounts at some length the arguments of a demographer who believes only freakish people remain in mid-sized cities–Harsch’s La Crosse is a place where the lives and deaths of pigeons are continually offering omens and where nearly everyone stands ready to betray everyone else.

Sound depressing? It can be, but Harsch tempers it all with enough acerbic humor and offbeat twists and turns to keep the reader hooked.

“When you read a book, you want to enjoy it,” he said. “One of the little ethics to my writing is I try to make something interesting happen on every page. That’s also more important to me than the plot.”

From creative uses for bratwurst to a plague-like swarm of mayflies that, perhaps more than anything else, is Spleen’s undoing, something interesting does happen on most every page of The Driftless Zone. The same is true in the sequel, which, like its predecessor, is full of narrative risks such as ending a chapter mid-sentence and beginning the next with the conclusion of the sentence.

Such maneuvers may lead a reader used to more traditional fair to ask whether there is a sure hand on the controls of these narratives. The answer is a qualified yes.

“There is an attempt at a sort of a zeroing in on the ending…. There is structure; it’s just not as tight as people are used to,” Harsch told me.

Part of that lack of “tightness” no doubt stems from Harsch’s view of the writing process, a view which some might find a bit cavalier.

“At root,” he argued, “it’s an arbitrary process. Nobody’s channeling through me. If you’re writing something and the phone rings, when you come back you’re going to write something different.”

But whatever he writes, Harsch is clear that it will be something that he feels strong about, both aesthetically and in terms of storyline.

“It’s important that I write something that I like and hope it radiates from there,” he said. Which is not to say he wouldn’t like mainstream success; he just isn’t willing to sacrifice his personal vision for it.

“People always ask me, ‘Why don’t you just write that one bestseller?’… The true answer is that I can’t,” he told me as he cleared the plates. “I’d like that [pointing at my copy of The Driftless Zone] to be a bestseller, just as it is, so I could retire and live on the Mediterranean.”

While Harsch may not provide bestseller material, he does offer a strikingly original narrative that sacrifices convention in favor of an attempt to describe accurately the human condition in late 20th-century America. All that and great Indian food to boot.

In Divided Light, Jan Weissmiller: November 4, 1999, Icon

I don’t review poetry very often, and I feel somewhat guilty about this. Given that the majority of my reviews over the years have been of books by authors coming to read at Prairie Lights and given that Prairie Lights presents a significant number of poets, a case could be made that I display painfully obvious prose bias.

Fact is, I often feel as unqualified to review poetry as it seems many of today’s readers feel to read. What if I don’t understand it? What if I interpret it all wrong? What if I mistake good poetry for bad due to my inability to crack the code?

Jan Weissmiller–who was a Prairie Lights employee when I wrote this piece and is now co-owner–provided a comforting and sufficient answer when I interviewed her for this piece: “Whatever it means to you is what it means.”

This review ran until the headline and subhead, “Going Public: Iowa City poet who had thought of her writing as ‘a private act’ publishes first book.”

For the past 17 or 18 years, Jan Weissmiller, a 1984 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, has composed poems. By and large, however, she has chosen not to publish that work.

“There are a lot of positive things about not publishing,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “You can revise (the poems) forever.”

Weissmiller had always thought of her writing as “a private act,” but the death of her mother two years ago changed her thinking about publishing her work. “I wanted something to give my father,” she said.

What she has given him, and us, is her first collection, titled  In Divided Light. The book is part of a series editied by Iowa poet Michael Carey for his publishing house, Loess Hills Books. Carey’s intention in starting Loess Hills was to publish Iowa writers, a label Weissmiller, who is originally from Illinois, might not choose for herself.

“Certainly I would identify myself as a Midwestern writer,” she said, quickly adding that she has reservations about that classification because some writers use such markers to designate ideological positions. “(The Midwest) is my subject matter, but I certainly don’t feel it is a regional or political stance,” she explained.

“I like the juxtaposition of heightened language and natural speech patterns,” she said. The poem that serves as a sort of introduction to the collection, “That Is,” demonstrated this juxtaposition as she describes the owls near her home: “Then at dusk/I came close to the glass,/and it opened its eyes/black in the non-/reflecting light,/and without a sound to alert the wind,/turned to its o-/pened wing.”

“I wanted the image of the wing opening,” she said in explanation of the unusual line break that divides the word “opened.” Weissmiller is a careful observer, and many of her poems seem to take a “found moment” and bring it into sharp relief.

“That really is the way it happens,” she said. “There are a lot of poems (in the collection) that are me looking out windows because I do a lot of that.” Not all of the window-gazing occurs in a static environment. The landscape viewed from a moving car is the subject of several poems, including “Driving East Toward the Moon on Interstate 80,” which reads, in part, “The moon who controls the tides,/ tonight is subdued over the vast inland/dances on the broken white dividing lines./–A fat backdrop to the neon Standard Oil sign–/The semis on the exit ramps dim their lights against the moon.”

These window-gazing poems are perhaps the most accessible of the pieces, but Weissmiller is largely unconcerned with the issues of meaning, symbolism and the like, suggesting that poetry is, and should be, an individual experience for the reader.

“Whatever it means to you is what it means,” she said. “You read (a poem) and if you find it beautiful and it moves you, you mediate on it; you hold it in your hands. It can mean something personal and something different to each person who reads it.” That’s an idea difficult for many people to accept. Weissmiller said the problem may be uniquely American. “There’s this democratic idea that we all should understand everything,” she said. But Weissmiller strives to provide her readers with pleasing sounds and word pictures rather than with puzzles to be solved.

“I would just hope the sound in (the poems) or the images would be enough,” she said. “I think it’s too much to ask that (readers) have to know what you intend.”

The majority of the poems in Weissmiller collection, however, offer sharp-eyed observations about the natural world or glimpses into the lives of people she knows and loves. Indeed, the first section of In Divided Light contains poems about her childhood in Mt. Carroll, Ill., about 20 miles south of Galena. This section of more-narrative poems, including the prose-like “Thinking of Rossa”– “My father got a birthday card from Deirdre Meyer/ and, with no reference to the time elapsed,/ my mother said, ‘I had dropped you and Lynn off/ at the Fun Fair at the Hofensburgers/when Laura Allen followed me home. She got/out of the car in the driveway and said,/”I think Deirdre Meyer is amoral”‘”–contains some of the oldest as well as some of the most recently written works in the book. Through these poems Weissmiller over the years has been able to trace the changes in the way she views life.

“The ones which were written more recently are less dramatic,” she suggested. “I think the drama has tempered over time.” What has not been tempered is the overall quality of Weissmiller’s work. In Divided Light showcases lovely, well-crafted poems.

Taking the Wall, Jonis Agee: October 28, 1999, Icon

At long last! A review I was truly qualified to write!

My years as an award-winning racing journalist (that is, a journalist who wrote about racing, not who did the actual racing) intersected with my reviewing like the heart of a figure eight racetrack.

This review ran under the headline and subhead: “Up against the wall, NASCAR driver: Agee’s new collection of stories checks under the hood of the auto-racing world.”

Jonis Agee is just a tad nervous as she travels from city to city reading from her latest collection of short stories, Taking the Wall. The book focuses on the lives of men and women who are involved, sometimes directly and sometimes tangentially, with auto racing.

“I’m living in fear,” Agee said in a telephone interview. “I’m just waiting for someone to point out some huge mistake. No matter what you write you’re bound to make mistakes.” Agee, however, has plenty of racing knowledge upon which to draw, beginning with a high-school boyfriend with a “very fast car.” But her real education came when she taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and began following CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) racing. Though the Indy-type cars were fascinating, they didn’t race enough to satisfy Agee and she soon turned her attention to another branch of motor sports–stock-car racing and the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.

“Winston Cup is it! ” she said enthusiastically. “It’s so cool; it’s awesome. It’s so American…You’re never allowed to quit.”

Agee points to the individual determination of many drivers on the Winston Cup circuit, including Mark Martin, well-known for his intense weight-lifting regimen and racing tenacity, even in the face of adversity. “He raced right after his dad died, ” Agee said. “He’s a real warrior.”

So you might expect Agee’s stories to focus on the men and women behind the wheel, but the pieces in Taking the Wall explore far more than driving experience. “The heroism to me is all the stuff which takes place around the driver,” Agee explained. “The race itself is kind of the final thing. The race is an intense experience, but it’s limited in time. There’s that other level of intensity–people living their lives around (racing).”

Many of the best stories in Taking the Wall take place away from the track. In “The Level of My Uncertainty,” for example, the narrator works on his newest demolition-derby car as he watches his 16-year-old daughter, an expert welder and emerging beauty, interact with the man who fills the shop’s water cooler. As the father tries to unobtrusively observe the courtship, he muses on how he is losing his daughter, not just to this man but to the appeals of a larger world outside the demolition-derby circuit. She has her sights set on the glitter of Winston Cup pit crews and people and places far from her current life. Though the father-fears-he’s-losing-his-daughter plot is far from unique, the story is carefully wrought and succeeds due in large part to Agee’s skillful handling of the narrator’s voice.

That skill is perhaps the greatest strength of this collection. Whether writing in the voice of a disappointed wife (“The Trouble With the Truth”), a disaffected crew member (“Getting the Heat Up”), or a disillusioned driver (“The First Obligation”), Agee’s characters are compelling because they speak in an unadorned but realistic style.

Careful to avoid standard stereotypes about racing and those who enjoy it–“I think it’s just a false impression that racing people, especially those in rural areas, do nothing but pick their teeth, drink beer, and watch TV,” she said–Agee focuses on some of the things about racing that draw so many people to it, including the way competitors will help each other even as they seek to beat one another on the rack. For example, it is not unusual to find racers sharing parts and information prior to the wave of the green flag. That sort of cooperation is not prevalent in other sports.

“You don’t see the Oakland Raiders going over to the Minnesota Vikings to ask if they can borrow some helmets,” Agee said with a laugh. The focus on the human aspects of auto racing makes Taking the Wall far more than, or arguably completely apart from, standard sports fiction. though a few of the stories take the reader out on the track with the driver (most notably “Flat Spotting”), the reader spends far more time waiting with the crew for the rain to clear (“Omaha”) or sitting in a cafe with a now-crippled driver obsessed with figuring out how the wall reached out and grabbed him (“Over the Point of Cohesion”). It is those moments, Agee said, which define the experiences of the racing faithful, and she has tried to render that world as realistically as possible.

“I hope people like (the book); I hope (those involved in racing) see their world in it,” Agee said. “I think that’s my job as a writer.”

Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund: October 14, 1999, Icon

For the longest time, I’ve thought of this as the most embarrassing review I’ve ever written. Happily, looking over it now, I see that I misremembered it. I thought I had suggested the Ahab’s Wife was as good as Moby Dick. Turns out, that’s not what I wrote. Rather, as you’ll see, I suggest that the title character of the Sena Jeter Naslund’s book is a fitting companion for the mad captain. Whew. I feel better.

I felt deeply under-qualified to review this book when I first accepted the assignment. I hadn’t read Moby Dick. Shocking really, given that I have an English degree and was presuming to review books. There was a simple solution to my feelings of inadequacy: I read Moby Dick before I read Ahab’s Wife. Given that this review ran in the same issue as the Shelby Steele review and just one week after the James Galvin review, I’m not sure how I pulled that off. It was certainly obsessive behavior. But I felt better.

This review ran until the headline and subhead: “Call Me Una?: Author gives great American novel a feminist, hopeful spin.”

In a chapter titled “Shakespeare and Company,” Una, title character and narrator of Sena Jeter Naslund’s newest novel Ahab’s Wife, muses about literature and asks herself the very questions that led Naslund to write her story: “(I)f one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with the universe? And how might a woman live such a life?”

Drawing on a few short passages from Herman Melvilles’ master work  Moby Dick, Naslund has created what she calls “a companion piece” to the book many consider already the great American novel. Ahab’s Wife tells the story of the woman, unnamed in Melville’s book, Captain Ahab leaves behind to pursue his obsessive revenge upon the great white whale. Though mentioned only briefly in Moby Dick, Naslund clearly recognized the great love Ahab had for this woman.

“She doesn’t have a name or any life,” Naslund said in a telephone interview, “but she is treated ver well in Moby Dick. It is clear that Ahab loves her. If I’d had evidence that Ahab had mistreated her, I probably wouldn’t have been interested in pursuing it, but I felt that Melville had planted this idea (of Ahab’s love for his wife) and then not developed it.

Naslund develops that idea and a host of others in a text that rivals Melville’s in both scope and beauty. Inspired rather than awed by Melville’s work, Naslund, a 1968 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, imagines Una as a magnificently resilient woman who faces and overcomes tragedy throughout her life as she seeks to define herself. Every but a match for the larger-than-life Ahab, Una arguably faces many more trials and tribulations than her husband but chooses a different path.

“Melville’s vision was a tragic and Shakespearean vision–the destruction of a great man,” Naslund said. “Ahab does create his own downfall and that’s grand and tragic. But in Ahab’s Wife, the vision is not tragic. It’s a narrative which ends in triumph…My book, instead of ending in death and destruction, ends with a sense of hope and of a having a place in the universe.”

Though the title defines the book’s main character in terms of her relationship with Melville’s creation, by the book’s end Una no longer seeks her identity in her relationships to others.

“In the roof walk scene (which ends the novel),” Naslund said, “she defines herself for herself in relation to the universe rather than waiting for a husband to come home and define her. She begins her own spiritual quest.”

In addition to creating a compelling equal for Ahab, Naslund also does a fine job recreating many of the characters, both major and minor, who inhabit Ishmael’s narrative in Moby Dick. The author has tackled this sort of challenge before in her book Sherlock in Love, a novel featuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creations. In both Sherlock in Love and Ahab’s Wife, she sought to bring something new to familiar characters while retaining their essential identities.

“I wanted to be consistent with what was in the canon,” she said of both books, “but rotate (the characters) just a bit to show a different side of them.”

But Una herself is at the heart of this tale. The reader follows her from her early days with a father obsessed with religious dogma to her adolescence spent living at a lighthouse with her aunt and uncle to her sudden decision to join the crew of a whaling ship disguised as a boy. Her ship is destroyed by a huge black whale, and she and two companions survive in a small whaling boat by turning to cannibalism, a subject hinted at but never directly addressed in Moby Dick. That passage, central to all that comes later in the book and linking Una to Ahab (who refers to himself in both Melville and Naslund’s books as “cannibal old me”), was among the most challenging to write, according to Naslund.

“I wrote it almost in a trance,” she said. “It wasn’t the language that was difficult; it was the experience (of writing about cannibalism).”

Naslund’s work, which follows Melville’s example by not sticking strictly to a first-person narrative–“If my great model could do it,” she argued, “I felt that I had license”–manages to emulate the form of Moby Dick without ever crossing the line into parody. Instead, Naslund had created a fitting mate for one of literature’s most fascinating characters and enriched his story while telling hers.

A Dream Deferred, Shelby Steele: October 14, 1999, Icon

I was gaining some confidence by the time I reviewed this book, but Steele was the first author to tell me that he thought I’d done a good job.

I attended his event at Coe and he was kind enough to tell me that he thought my questions were much better than those he was usually asked. I know I stammered through that conversation, but I was extremely pleased.

Over time, I would be shocked (and pleased) by the number of authors who told me I did a better than average job. The reason for my success could almost always be traced back to a single factor: I read the books before I interviewed the authors.

This piece ran under the headline and subhead “The negative effects of affirmative action: Shelby Steele builds the case that the initiative hurts blacks while appeasing white guilt.”

Dr. Shelby Steele hasn’t returned to Coe College since he graduated in 1968. He has, however, spoken at many colleges and universities over the last several years, and those visits have often been steeped in controversy and confrontation.

On Monday, Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, finally returns to his alma mater with a lecture titled A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in American–also the title of his most recent book of essays concerning racial issues. Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1991.

In both volumes, Steele, himself a black man, argues that affirmative action has has a pernicious effect on blacks in the United States, undermining the very habits and principles necessary for success and self-determination. But because the idea of black victimization leads to power for blacks in the form of concessions and preferences in many areas, and allows whites to feel a sense of redemption through the act of offering these concessions, affirmative action holds sway. This remains true, he points out, despite the fact that polls suggest that the majority of Americans are opposed to racial preferences.

“In poll after poll,” Steele said in a recent telephone interview, “as many as 80 to 90 percent of Americans say they are opposed to preferences based on race. Even among blacks, it’s as high as 45 percent. And yet [the preferences] prevail across the land.”

Part of the reason for that, according to Steele, is what he calls “the power of stigma.”

“Whites who publicly come out against preferences will be called racists, and blacks will be called Uncle Toms,” he said. “So the issue is never addressed in any serious way.”

Steele, however, is committed to addressing these issues, even if it means uncomfortable moments during speaking engagements. His views often meet with resistance due in large measure to college cultures that feature admission preferences for blacks, separate departments to study minority issues, and self-segregated social activities; but Steele refuses to let that resistance discourage him from speaking.

“If you’re going to take a risk and write what you honestly think and feel,” he said, “my personal belief is that you have to go out and talk to people directly. You have to stand by it.”

However, he does consider his invitations carefully, accepting only those he believes are offered by groups interested in open discussion. That discussion is something Steele truly values.

‘The writing has put me in a situation which has allowed me to interact with people in ways I wouldn’t otherwise,” he said, “and it’s helped my work.”

As a member of the baby boomer generation, Steele lived through the civil rights era of the early ’60s and has been saddened to see the early goal of true equality for all citizens replaced by a system of preferences designed to expiate the guilt of white Americans. That black leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Cornell West would use that system as a means to power, despite its negative effect on blacks, concerns him as well. He finds it unfortunate that the younger generations, made up of individuals who have known nothing other than the current policies concerning race, have yet to truly tackle these issues.

“I have not seen very much activism,” he said. “I don’t see Generation X overturning the paradigm of racial policy. That generation hasn’t found a way to earnestly debate these issues. We look for new generations to do that.”

This is not to say that no young people are addressing questions of race. Steele is on the board of an organization called The Center for New Black Leadership in Washington, D.C. That organization and others like it attract many young people interested in changing the way Americans deal with race. Perhaps due to the constant struggle with a powerful orthodoxy, Steele argues, these young people have “the intellectual heft to have a big impact.”

Steele himself packs an intellectual punch in his most recent book as he carefully develops his arguments against affirmative action and concepts such as multiculturalism.

“The goal of America’s highly politicized multiculturalism is to create an atavistic form of citizenship,” he writes, “a citizenship of preferential status in which race, ethnicity, and gender are linked to historic victimizations to justify entitlement unavailable to other citizens. Culture is a pretext, a cover.”

But Steele argues that there is another ingredient more necessary than intellectualism when it comes to facing a deeply entrenched policy that Americans prefer to quietly accept rather than question publicly.

“There is no magic formula for confronting (these issues),” he said, “other than simple courage.”