Jim Grimsley

Later the Same Day by Grace Paley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I first read this collection years ago I must have been going through a period of distraction; the voices of the stories were clear but the stories themselves never came through. This was clearly my own failing. On rereading the book I found it to be wrought cleanly and sparely, reliant on the voices of this particular set of women – Faith, Ruth, Ann, sometimes others – to do the work of narrative. Paley is preoccupied with politics, justice, the idea of enlightenment through intellectual engagement; with children, perhaps more than any other aspect of family. “Dreamer in a Dead Language” ends with such a beautiful moment, a woman asking her children to bury her in sand, snapping at the one son who takes her too seriously, who fails to see she means to be buried as people are at the beach, not in a graveyard. “So I can give you a good whack every now and then.” The final story, “Listening,” ends with a gorgeously angry Cassie demanding to know why she and her love for women have been left out of Faith’s tales, and a moment of love at the end, along with the promise from Cassie, “I will not forgive you.” I vacillated at times in irritation at the obsessive politics – obsessive being my own judgment, of course – though it is examined and critiqued even while its essence is upheld. This is particularly the case in “Somewhere Else,” about a trip to China, where we see the characters coping with the fact of China when they had preferred, perhaps, to visit the ideal China of their politics. “Zagrowsky Tells” is another example of the self-critiquing aspect of the stories, Faith’s dialog with a white shop owner whom she picketed and accused of racism, and his defense of himself through his love for his black grandson. There is a clumsiness to that story, however, one of the rare moments of that kind in the book. There is also overall a narrowness to the stories themselves – they are devoted to the same themes, the same relationships, the same politics. This is their mission, after all. But the beauty of the spoken language of these characters is rare. I had enjoyed Paley’s earlier books and am glad to have tried this one again.

The View from Stalin’s Head by Aaron Hamburger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a strong collection of stories, the most impressive aspect of which is the setting and material, Americans, and particularly Jewish Americans, in the Czech Republic, most in Prague, a city that was the cool destination for artists for quite a number of years. The most memorable of the stories for me is the title story and its examination of (and a very subtle examination of) domination dynamics and betrayal between two boys and an older man who is reliving his days as an opponent of what I would call Stalinism, because of the title. There are other jewels here: the first story, “A Man of the Country” and its subtle portrayal of longing, friendship, and a hope that is marginal and fogged. “The Ground You Are Standing On” has a remarkable power, an evocation of the Holocaust as it is still fought out in the present day. I would call “You Say You Want a Revolution” the weakest of the stories, never quite certain of its purpose, though containing some lovely dialogue moments and portraits. These stories viewed in today’s gender setting are examinations of types of people, not particularly centered on queer themes, though queers are welcome here. The stories hold to their territory with strength and integrity and mark out the further development of a fine writer. I have been hesitant as to my rating because I know Aaron but when I think of the presence of an oversized paper mâché bust of Stalin in the basement of a grim apartment where a strange fantasy is repeated… Well, that settles the issue.

In New Orleans a long time ago when drag queens often wore beards and mustaches, when realness was only one way of doing drag, when transgender people were usually called transsexuals, in the bars in the French Quarter we called each other she, girl; look at her with her face in her drink, we would say, look at her about to go to the back room and get on her knees in front of that man, oh girl, she’s got calluses on those knees, or splinters, we would say, and burst into hoots and spill bits of alcohol on the nasty floor. The bar was dark, lights around the pool table where we could watch the butch boys bend over in their jeans. A juke box where the current dance songs were playing. Sometimes the bartender would give me change to get the music going, and I’d pick out something by Donna Summer, Bruce Springsteen, Roberta Flack, Michael Jackson, and we would sing along, harmonizing to the song while he, the bartender, did his dance down the island, flashing his pretty behind at the customers, working the tips. Girl, that man likes you, said my friend. I never made much of it, mostly asexual. Some instinct we had that the notion of he and she had to be fluid, that we had to slide from one to the other as the need arose. Girls had to stick together, run in packs, pick out the real men in the crowd, leave each other alone – what would two queens want with one another, we would ask, all they’d do was fight about who was on the bottom. Not so clear cut as that, of course, but we pretended. Kept the group neutral maybe. Oh, girl, please buy me a drink, these heels are killing me. Even if we weren’t wearing heels. Even if all we really were went something like this: slightly sissy boys in cheap jeans and button-down shirts, a bit pudgy, wearing boat shoes or oxfords. Hair stiff with product, thick with cologne. Talking to ourselves like we were the center of it all, like we were really princesses, and looking about hungry to figure out who in the bar might be worth trying to pick up. Or else frightened at the thought and hoping somebody would just find us and make all the decisions and at least take us home instead of down the end of some French Quarter alley. This was where we figured out gender for ourselves. Heading out for the night we would say, knockers up girls, tonight we’re going to find true love.

Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These are powerful stories carved out of real stuff. Everything I respect and love about writing is embodied here. Jones can write a first line that gives a full frame to every story, often with a note of forewarning, even forboding. “On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.” This is the opening to “The First Day,” one of the most perfect stories I have ever read. Heartbreak is there from this beginning, and yet the story that follows is never sentimental, never over-reaches; simply one detail follows another, perfectly encapsulated. Every story in the collection is at this level. “Young Lions” is a fearful exchange. “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” is a lucid exploration of parenthood, but also the story of a world contained within the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of its setting. I have read some of these stories over and over again, always seeing some sentence I had never noticed before. There is simply and truly no one who writes better than Edward Jones. Nor any one who writes stories of more importance.

Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very old novel, the actual date of its writing in dispute, its authorship also in dispute, written out by hand, copied so many times that the state of the manuscript itself is the subject of much scholarship; the novel was revised by a writer in the Ming dynasty who, according to the translator, improved the novel greatly in form. It is a magnficent piece of work; like much that is magnificent, it exists in its own terms. Its ambition and scope sit like a mountain on the literary landscape. There is truly nothing else like it. The story of the collapse – or rather the long, slow death – of the Han dynasty and the emergence of three stable kingdoms from the wreckage. There are at least a thousand characters in the book, many of them major, all playing a vivid, palpable role in the proceedings, whether for a paragraph or for many chapters. The bulk of the book takes up the long conflict between Cao Cao, a noble who captures the last of the Han emperors and uses him as the center of a northern kingdom, and Liu Bei, a distant relative of the Han who attempts to defend the dynasty and reunite the many parts of China that have fallen away from the emperor’s rule. This is not a modern novel in which characters deliberate about their actions and reveal themselves in psychological detail; this is a saga, an epic, in which the people are indicated by their deeds, their pronouncements, with an occasional reference to their private moments, their thoughts, their longings. Such a vivid piece of writing, it was exhausting at times to read it, coming in at over 2200 pages in four volumes. This is a book to study, one of the central texts of Chinese history and culture, helping to define the nation’s ideas of legitimate rule, politics, honor, and military craft. There are moments of startling savagery: a meal in which the host, starving in a time of famine, cooks his wife to serve her up for dinner; the killing of a eunuch in the bedchamber of an emperor in which his murderers eat his raw flesh. There is no other experience in reading like this one. The kind of novel that a writer devotes decades to producing, the bulk of his life’s energies, perhaps – though the reputed author is also said to have written The Water Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh), a book that is equally long.