Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 30 2011

Job has nothing on 15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead, Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that has ever come easily to her. When the boys used to take her down in the dirt or in the back seats of stripped cars in her front yard, she could escape briefly, pretend to be Psyche, Eurydice, Daphne, her favorite nymphs and goddesses from the Greek myths. But Manny, the boy who put the baby inside her, won’t look at her anymore. Esch can’t lie down in the dirt and pretend to be someone else or anywhere else. She’s stuck in shabby Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black Mississippi bayou town in the direct path of a hurricane they’re calling Katrina.

“Salvage the Bones,” the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale. Think of Noah or Gilgamesh or any soggy group of humans and dogs huddled together, waiting out an apocalyptic act of God or weather. It’s an old story — of family honor, revenge, disaster — and it’s a good one. As Arnold Schoenberg said, “There is still much good music that can be written in C major.” And Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood.

Best of all, she gives us a singular heroine who breaks the mold of the typical teenage female protagonist. Esch isn’t plucky or tomboyish. She’s squat, sulky and sexual. But she is beloved — her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior are fine and strong; they brawl and sacrifice and steal for her and each other. And Esch is in bloom. Her love for Manny and her love for literature have animated the world; everything is suddenly swollen and significant. “He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts.” The headiness of the language is the book’s major strength and flaw. Ward can get carried away. She never uses one metaphor when she can use three, and too many sentences grow waterlogged and buckle.

Set in the 12 days leading up to and just after Hurricane Katrina, the novel presents each day as a distinct vignette with the punch of a story. The book opens with China, Skeetah’s pit bull, splitting open in the shed, birthing her first litter while the family watches and Skeetah massages her hips. And every ensuing scene riffs on these themes: the tenderness of men, the blessings that are brothers, the nearness of death. As a through-line, Ward weaves in the classics. Esch’s love of the Greek myths has inoculated her not from horror but from surprise. When Manny spurns her, she is ready: “In every one of the Greeks’ mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in a ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” She already knows that nature is protean and mischievous, that the gods tumble to earth to chase mortal women, girls can turn into trees, a hurricane can laugh, and the creek will rise out of its bed and wend its way into her house “to eat and play.”

For all its fantastical underpinnings, “Salvage the Bones” is never wrong when it comes to suffering. Sorrow and pain aren’t presented as especially ennobling. They exist to be endured — until the next Katrina arrives to “cut us to the bone.” And like every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety.

There were many books I admired this year, books I read and reread and recommended. Salvage the Bones is every bit as good as they say it is. And there were groundbreaking narrative nonfiction books about India: Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (out in Feb. 2012) are works of profound witness, kinship, artistic achievement, and moral necessity.

But only one book left me breathless.

I didn’t read — I succumbed – to The Journals of John Cheever. I picked it up one evening after the guests had gone, after the ashtrays had been emptied and the dog walked. I was lightly drunk and working on getting more seriously drunk (the Cheevering hour?); I idly opened the book — and let it have its way with me all weekend in the spare room.

It’s a disheveling, debauching book. Even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption. These journals, posthumously edited by Cheever’s longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, are a 40-year chronicle of wanting health but plotting, ardently, self-destruction. Of struggling with alcoholism and bisexuality. Of wanting very much to love one’s wife and only one’s wife — but falling gratefully into the arms of any stranger who will have you. Of the soul as irredeemably “venereal, forlorn, and uprooted.”

Cheever had a brain and body so responsive — “touchy like a triggered rattrap” — everything he sees turns him on, makes him cry, turns him rhapsodic. Desire stains everything. And it isn’t airy, “Chopinesque longing,” no — it’s itchy and inconvenient, “as coarse and real as the hair on my belly,” he writes. “In the public urinal I am solicited by the man on my right. I do not dare turn my head. But I wonder what he looks like. No better or no worse, I guess than the rest of us in such throes.”

I love this Cheever, so lust-worn, fatigued, wise. The Cheever who observes, “I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.” But I love him more when he’s cross, crass, and ornery. When he’s querulous and moaning for “a more muscular vocabulary,” his face on a postage stamp, a more reliable erection. When he carps about his contemporaries (Calvino: “cute,” Nabokov: “all those sugared violets”). But Cheever the ecstatic, who merges with the mountain air and streams, who finds in writing and sex a bridge between the sacred and the profane and is as spontaneous and easy as a child — he is indispensable.

“Today gloomy and humid. I walk the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.”

The days are short and few. Stay up late with John Cheever. Contemplate your corruption with cheer. Be dignified tomorrow. Remember: “The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting.”

Parul Sehgal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 1, 2011

“The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s first book since “The Line of Beauty,” the 2004 Man Booker Prize winner, is a sly and ravishing masterpiece. The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and louche wit.

It’s a devastating history of gay love, erasure and resilience. It’s also a ripping yarn, a simple love (or rather, lust — Hollinghurst’s characters are too arch, too Wildean for love) story as literary whodunit: “Brideshead Revisited” crossed with “Possession.”

The book begins in 1913, on the eve of World War I. Cecil Valance (modeled on Rupert Brooke) is a young poet and guest at the home of his lover and Cambridge classmate, George Sawle.

Rich, reckless, coming into fame, Cecil glamours the family — from the valet to George’s 16-year-old sister, Daphne. He presents her with a poem-in-progress, “Two Acres,” which, in actuality, is a covert love poem to George. Cecil goes to the front and makes his name on his ecstatic poems from the trenches. He dies, still young and beautiful, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and thus begin the Sawle and Valance family troubles.

They’re forever “shackled to old Cecil.” Daphne and Cecil had exchanged some grim love letters –”Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” She becomes widely regarded as Cecil’s great love and the inspiration for “Two Acres,” the most famous (and most misconstrued) poem in England.

Misreadings mushroom until the book arrives at the present: The two families have fallen into declining fortunes and a clenched-jaw peace in Cecil’s shadow, when a biographer, Paul Bryant, certain that the “Two Acres” was addressed to Daphne’s brother, begins interviewing the surviving Valances and Sawles. For “smut essentially,” sniffs Daphne, now shabby and withered and a bit mad. He turns up a raft of secrets.

Around this central story ripple countless others: shadowy affairs and abortive seductions among gay minor characters. Behind the bloom of Hollinghurst’s prose, another project quietly unfurls.

As much as “The Stranger’s Child” is about England and Englishness, about war, about the impulse toward biography, it’s profoundly and unmistakably a secret literary history. It’s the tapestry of British literature turned around to reveal its seams, to reveal that the history of the British novel has been the history of gay people in Britain.

It’s Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and the entire Bloomsbury set (name checked extensively in the book), a history — as Cecil’s is — of invisibility, secrecy and scandal, bowdlerization, censure and frenetic posthumous outing. This pr cis might be stuffy; trust that the book never is.

“The Stranger’s Child” restores gay life and love to the vibrant center of the British novel without a hint of solemnity or righteousness, only supple prose and a sodden, fun bunch of obviously, gloriously gay characters. Seldom has literary restitution proved so pleasurable.

By Parul Sehgal, Publishers Weekly Sept. 30, 2011

In Walking with the Comrades, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) travels into the forest with India’s Maoist indigenous communities at war with the government.

How did you earn the guerrillas’ trust?

When the Indian government declared war against the Maoists, Indian liberals, for the most part, took a very safe, neutral position: “The government is bad, the Maoists are bad, the poor people are sandwiched in the middle.” I am no Maoist, but I thought that was a profoundly dishonest position. It elided the fact that the government had secretly sold lands belonging to indigenous tribes to mining and infrastructure companies. This is illegal and unconstitutional, and yet it was being done brazenly. Hundreds of thousands of paramilitary police were closing in on forest villages to clear the land for the corporations. About 600 villages had been emptied; some 300,000 people had fled their homes and had either moved to police camps or were hiding, terrified, in the forest. Many had joined the guerrilla army and were fighting back. The government and the media, campaigning for corporations, labeled them terrorists and called for them to practice Gandhian nonviolence. I wrote that Gandhian nonviolence was political theater that could be effective provided it had a sympathetic and empowered audience; how could people in remote forest villages, far from the gaze of the media or a hostile middle class be Gandhian while they were being raped and murdered? How could the starving go on hunger strike? How could those with no money boycott goods? My writings made their way into the forest, and one day a note was slipped under my door, inviting me to walk with the comrades.

What surprised you most about them?

I believed that when people take up arms, the violence would inevitably turn against the women in the community. In the forest I was disabused of this notion—45% of the Peoples Liberation Guerrilla Army is made up of women. Many of them joined after watching the brutal attacks of the police and the government sponsored vigilante groups on their villages. Others joined to escape the patriarchal practices of their own tribal society. The Maoist party has been a very patriarchal organization; the women within it still have major battles to fight (like women everywhere), but in the forest, I was in complete awe of the women I met. There was a lovely moment when I went down to a river with some women guerillas to bathe, while others kept guard. I remember thinking to myself, “Look at the women in this river—writers, guerrillas, farmers—how very wonderful.”

You write about India’s poor and disenfranchised, but you do so in English (and with a fairly sophisticated style, to boot)? Who do you write for?

Language is such a volatile and political issue in India. We have hundreds of languages and each has its own history of oppression and exclusion. So whatever language you write in, you’re excluding the majority of people in the country. Yes, I write in English, but my writing is immediately translated into Hindi, Bengali, Odiya, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam. Still, it is a huge irony to be a writer, in any language, in a country where so many are illiterate. Who do I write for? For everybody and nobody. I write when my body cannot accommodate my silence any more. I do what I can to use language and not let it use me.

One of the pleasures of reading your writing is your irreverence and exuberance—a tone not commonly found in analyses of this sort. Is this a voice that you’ve had to hone?

I don’t spend a moment thinking about my style. But I do spend a fair amount of time structuring the argument and narrative. It takes a few drafts for me to moderate the fury I feel. As for irreverence, I’ve always found so much laughter, so much cutting humor amongst people even in the most deadly moments. When I think back on my time in the forest, more than anything else I remember laughing till tears were streaming down my face.

You invite our admiration for how “the poorest people in the world have managed to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.” How can readers support these communities?

The Maoists are only the militant end of a bandwidth of resistance movements in India—all of them are posing a radical challenge to accepted ideas of what constitute progress, “development,” and civilization itself. The main thing readers can do is to not think of this conversation as a conversation about others, but to look at their own “civilizations” and ask: “What can we do to help ourselves, to open our imaginations to another way of thinking?”

Parul Sehgal, The Plain Dealer, September 18, 2011

Papa can’t rest in peace.

Has there been an American author more relentlessly mythologized, psychoanalyzed, and plain pilloried than Ernest Hemingway?

He’s been labeled a brute, a bully and a bore. A heartless seducer of women and a closeted homosexual. An absurd cartoon of hypermasculinity and a transvestite. His critics and rivals, his children and grandchildren have had their say in memoirs. His fiction has been combed for clues. His bones have been picked clean. But one little mystery remains. And her name is Pilar.

She’s a sturdy, 38-foot motor yacht, hewn from Canadian fir and Honduran mahogany, “sea kindly” as the old fishermen used to say, steadfast in any waters. And steadfast she proved — outlasting Hemingway’s three wives, the dissolution of almost every one of his friendships, and the slow unraveling of his confidence and his sanity.

She’s the heroine of a glorious new biography, “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961,” from Paul Hendrickson, who won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2004 for “Sons of Mississippi.”

The craft proves that there just might be one more way of telling Papa’s story.

By focusing on Pilar — and the period Hemingway possessed her, his final 27 years — Hendrickson anchors his account in the material, not the speculative. Thus this book, full of pilgrimages — first to Pilar herself, who Hendrickson finds in Cuba, beached “on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale.”

The author handles her like the relic she is, and makes of her a cunning, capable metaphor for Hemingway’s contradictory drives. Pilar was instrumental to the creation of the Hemingway myth and where he fled to escape it. Hendrickson aligns the “dry-docked, parts-plundered” boat hollowed out by termites and her erstwhile owner “who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame.”

In coming at his subject through this love letter to a boat, Hendrickson achieves a copious, mystical portrait of “this most riddlesome of men.” If conventional Hemingway biographies follow a familiar trajectory — pinning the posturing and the depression on some early trauma (his mother’s propensity for dressing him as a girl, his war wound, his father’s own suicide) — in coming at his subject at a slant, Hendrickson complicates and humanizes Hemingway.

Which is not to say he reveals the man. Papa still proves maddeningly elusive. This is, after all, a book about a boat, and we learn far more about the fish Hemingway lands than any of his wives. What we do get is context. Hendrickson fills in the negative space exuberantly. He imagines each scene completely, and then imagines himself into it. The book becomes a participatory biography — the details are rendered with a hallucinatory intensity.

We’re in the scene, merging with Hendrickson and Hemingway’s consciousness, scouting the Michigan rivers Hemingway fished as a boy, wiggling our toes into the riverbeds — some pebbled, some “soft as birdshot,” wading deeper into waters “icy cold, clean as silver, riffling over stones, alive with fat, pulpy rainbows.”

Contouring not Hemingway but his environment and the weight of his presence equips Hendrickson to take on his second, subtler task: to consider the “destructive influence of a man’s unconscious on those whom he deeply loved” — namely, his sons.

There were three Hemingway boys, all unhappy in their own way — but none so tragic as the youngest: Gregory, nicknamed Gigi. He struggled to be the son his father wanted, miserably concealing his compulsion to wear women’s clothing, and even exiling himself to Africa for a season of “therapeutic” elephant shooting. He underwent gender reassignment surgery, but by then the effects of substance abuse and bipolarism had begun. He died, raving, in a women’s prison in 2001.

Gigi’s life reads like one long scream. It’s depicted with sensitivity (although it’s curious that Hendrickson never refers to Gigi by his chosen name, Gloria, nor does he use the female pronoun) and squeamishness. Chary of “daffy” psychological explanations, Hendrickson makes his own clumsily: “I’ll whoof this straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt.”

The author’s primness keeps him from exploring the implications of this startling claim, even as Hendrickson identifies Hemingway’s agonized attraction to the feminine “which is why his work endures, why his best work will always have its tuning-fork ‘tremulousness.’ “

Still, it’s the unimpeachably masculine Hemingway who dominates the book. All his ambiguities and darkness — the months in the “bunker-like house” in landlocked Idaho, where he rotted, tormented by bipolarism and his inability to write — fly by in summary.

It’s as though Hendrickson’s eye is trained to find splendor, to seek the light. “Amid so much ruin, still the beauty,” he writes. And so this bighearted book leaves us with a litany of sorrows, but also images of grace: of heroism in Gigi’s muddled final moments; of tenderness and lucidity in Hemingway’s paranoid last days; and of Pilar and her promise of escape, renewal, and the open sea.

Parul Sehgal is a senior editor at Publishers Weekly.

Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 16

Rehan Tabassum is in a bad way. Although, strictly speaking, the trouble isn’t of his making. He’s just got that kind of family — prone to falling in love with the servants, scheming against one another, messing with the wrong fundamentalist and leaving sensitive home videos lying about. The Tabassums, owners of a telecommunications empire in Pakistan, are a brutal, blundering clan grown crooked and strange after years of bending to the will of their autocratic patriarch. Their methods are medieval, but they’re punished for their excesses and brutality in distinctly modern ways: they’re blackmailed via text messages and pilloried in the comments of Internet articles.

“Noon” is Aatish Taseer’s third book in three years. Here, as in his memoir, “Stranger to History,” and his first novel, “The Temple-Goers,” he mines his own life to reflect on his preoccupations: patrimony, social stratification, the rise of India, the devolution of Pakistan. Taseer gives his protagonist, Rehan, the contours of his own life — the accomplished Indian Sikh mother and estranged Pakistani Muslim father, the Delhi childhood and American education, the writerly ambitions and frustration with Islam. It’s an austere, straightforward story that sets personal corruption and familial betrayals against a background of political violence, something the author knows intimately. Taseer’s father was Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, assassinated in January of this year by his own bodyguard.

The book begins in Delhi in the late 1980s. The product of a brief affair, Rehan grows up fatherless, but he’s not unduly bothered by this since he’s cosseted by his grandmother and mother. These early scenes are competent if bloodless. The plot gets juicier once Rehan is older, attending college in Massachusetts but receiving his real education when he periodically returns home to the subcontinent. On one such occasion, Rehan, who has hitherto “not considered it important to think hard about India,” gets a crash course in Delhi’s class war when his house is burgled. It’s clearly an inside job, and Rehan must preside over the police interrogation of his servants. It’s the Milgram experiment meets Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” a fine, morally messy vignette that forces Rehan to acknowledge his power.

Later, he travels to Pakistan to visit his father and half siblings, and it’s in the airy, scary seaside town of Port bin Qasim that the book opens up and breathes. Taseer allows his characters to expatiate on family and faith, sex and politics — and it’s a ripe moment for philosophy. The “fundoos” (fundamentalists) have found their next target, linguistic purity, and are merrily attacking English storefront signs and immolating themselves in the streets if they discover their own names have Sanskrit roots. Things prove equally bizarre on the family front. Rehan’s half brother, the polymorphously perverse Isphandiyar, hopscotches from one scandal to the next: he has just ended an affair with his father’s former girlfriend and is now being blackmailed over a sex tape in what appears to be an other inside job.

Taseer is a writer of great potential who excels at building absorbing moral tangles, and he renders well the divisions within contemporary Pakistani society, in which the elite regard the extremists with a mixture of embarrassment and terror. Why then does Taseer make so many amateurish mistakes, with long passages of exposition delivered through dialogue and prose sullied by infelicities? With such laziness of language comes, inevitably, imprecision of thought. (We’re treated to cryptic aphorisms like “To be morally superior in India was to feel physically weak and insecure.”) At times, “Noon” reads like sociology masquerading as literature.

The characters themselves are concepts intended to embody specific social phenomena: the Sexually Repressed Zealot, the Technocrat, the Obsequious Servant, the Predacious and Westernized Upper-Class Woman. Taseer never complicates or subverts these broad types; they’re kept static, struck against one another like flint and steel to illuminate the conflicts between rich and poor, East and West, tradition and modernity. These characters-as-concepts descend with dismaying frequency into ugly stereotype (gay characters in particular do not fare well) or remain so undeveloped that empathy is impossible.

Not even Rehan emerges clearly. He’s mainly a cipher whose naïveté allows savvier characters (and, by extension, Taseer) to deliver uninterrupted monologues on, say, What Ails Pakistan. He’s so hazy, it’s difficult even to pin him down as a reliable or unreliable narrator. Before describing the book’s grisly climax, he warns us that “the material is strange and distressing, and the tale without moral, unless you consider looking and recording with a sympathetic eye as moral enough.” But later we realize that Rehan was instrumental in this “strange and distressing” story. Wasn’t he aware of his role? How much is he telling? This sort of speculation, ordinarily so pleasurable and profitable, feels useless in the case of “Noon” because Rehan is so faintly, haphazardly drawn.

Taseer clearly wants “Noon” to be a grand narrative, to deal in portentous themes — and it does. Even at its most artless, it asks difficult questions: What does it mean to be rich in a poor country? Or to possess power that you don’t want? Why have the “educated classes” in India and Pakistan abdicated their social responsibilities? And (as illustrated by the rise and fall of the Tabassums), what does it mean for a family or a nation to be taught that treachery, not charity, begins at home?

Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Sept/Oct/Nov 2011 

India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells a darker story, focusing on the boom’s seamy side: the scoundrels and profiteers, and the millions of farmers and migrant workers crushed beneath the juggernaut of “progress.” “The modernity of India,” he writes drily, is “an ambiguous phenomenon.” His point is that even as India has seen an increase in middle-class “aspirers,” “the poor have seen little or no improvement,” and he makes the argument with singular ease. Much of his reportage—on India’s villages, “cyber-cities,” and luxury malls—is done on foot, and his book possesses a gait of its own, achieving a contemplative, rambling rhythm that absorbs passing sights and sounds into anecdote, knits anecdote into analysis, and then analysis into advocacy.

Deb’s inquiry begins with the beautiful people, the architects and beneficiaries of India’s gilded age: entrepreneurs, engineers, and their acolytes—“an army of Gatsbys, wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust.” It’s a moment with its own name (“India Shining”) whose mantra is that you’re only as small as your ambitions (an ethos Deb nails in his observation that India’s evolving ideals have been mirrored in the career of actor Amitabh Bachchan, who went “from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium”). Deb strips away the myths to reveal a much harsher reality. The lives of computer programmers and call-center employees, whom Americans depend on for technical support and customer service, are as much about isolation and displacement as high salaries. Meanwhile, Arindam Chaudhuri, the wealthy and enigmatic founder of an international “management institute,” has been celebrated for making higher education more accessible—but Deb digs a bit deeper and finds evidence that the program might be a cleverly designed Ponzi scheme. (When it appeared in India, the chapter, originally published in The Caravan magazine, inspired Chaudhuri to file multiple libel lawsuits—against Deb, his publishers, and, for its role in distributing the information, Google. For this reason, the chapter in Indian editions is slightly altered.)

With each chapter, Deb descends one rung down into a lower socioeconomic class, turning up stories too grim, too at odds with the national narrative of progress, to make it into India’s mainstream media. In the boom’s heyday, between 1995 and 2006, he writes, two hundred thousand debt-ridden farmers committed suicide. Another four hundred million farmers—one-fourteenth of the world’s population—stand to be displaced. Seventy-seven percent of the population survives on fifty cents a day. The Beautiful and the Damnedhumanizes these statistics. Deb immerses himself in villages and slums, squats in the barracks of a steel factory, and struggles to earn the trust of the wary and exhausted workers (“I was so well fed and well rested in contrast to them that I might as well have come from another planet”).

The Beautiful and the Damned does lack a coda. It doesn’t end so much as peter out. The book deserves a conclusion as fully realized and harmoniously composed as each of its chapters, something that suggests the implications of—and resistance to—such lopsided growth (and something that elaborates on Deb’s occasional intriguing offhand comments, such as that “slow, stubborn activism [is] as much a story of the new India as the frenetic milieu of the call centre workers”). Still, this brave book strikes a rare note—as a work of journalism and as an interpretation of India’s maladies. The Beautiful and the Damned digs beneath the self-congratulatory stories India tells itself—all the better to expose the stories it seeks to repress.

By Parul Sehgal, Publishers Weekly Jul 08, 2011

The celebrated director of such films as The Thin Blue Line and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War investigates some of photography’s most iconic, enduring, and mysterious images in Believing Is Seeing from Penguin Press.

Is it true you were once a private eye? Has it influenced how you look at the truth? 

It’s true I worked as a detective, but I think the desire to investigate things… either you have it or you don’t. It’s the Dupin or the Sherlock Holmes in me. Almost all of my work has been about this underlying belief that we can figure things out. And every photograph is a mystery. Photographs rip a swatch from the fabric of reality. They decontextualize. But they’re still connected to the world, and they tell two stories: one about our belief about images, but also about one moment in history, of something happening at one moment in front of one particular lens. At its heart, this is a romantic book. To try to figure out—what was that world recorded by James Fenton? Or the world of Amos Humiston and the photograph found in his hands on the battlefield at Gettysburg?

Many of these stories first appeared on your blog at the New York Times. When did you realize you had a book on your hands?

When I realized I could actually write. The first big piece I did was on the James Fenton photographs of the Crimean War. You wouldn’t imagine that it would be the kind of subject matter that would attract a lot of attention, but it did. The piece—and the book—is about photographs as a way of entering history through something very specific. If you pick up any one of the hundreds of histories of the Crimean War, invariably it will start off with a description of the historical antecedents and gradually and chronologically you will enter in the story. Same with biography; you open one and you’re reading about someone’s maternal grandparents. What a photograph allows you to do is to enter history in the middle of everything. As I imagine it, you walk into the photographs and start looking around. That’s the beginning of a mystery.

It was your investigation into Fenton’s photographs—and your team’s attempt to establish what time they were taken by analyzing every stone and shadow—that first made the Crimean War real to me, that persuaded me that it actually happened. So as you say, photographs seem to make history not only specific but material. 

We’re connected through particulars—that’s really our experience of being alive. When I ended up in Crimea, I had a map from 1855 with me. I was standing on a hill that the map called Snail Hill. I looked down, and there were little snails all over the place. Later I read a soldier’s account of being in one of the trenches on Snail Hill, and he was surrounded by all of the little snails. I felt suddenly connected to history, and connected through particulars, through the odd details.

You’re rare in that unlike most people who have written a great deal about photography, you’ve actually worked extensively with cameras. Photography isn’t abstract to you. Has this influenced how you’d read, say, Sontag or Barthes? 

I know that Sontag’s essay on the Abu Ghraib photos in the New York Times magazine influenced me in so many ways, although I didn’t agree with her conclusions. What she didn’t do—and what I have tried to do—is accept that photographs are never a given. We may think we know what a photograph means, we may think we know what it’s of, but we don’t. To me the Abu Ghraib photos are a perfect example of a kind of mystery. What was going on? Were they all taken for the same reasons? Who were the people that took them? Whenever you look at a photograph, you’re looking at what is no longer there. The photograph is there, but what was photographed is transient, is gone. Proust had his madeleines. I have my photographs.

(In an effort to become more methodical in my reading–as well as to make sure I’m rereading enough–I’m keeping a running list.)

Currently reading: By Blood by Ellen Ullman

December/January

Reader’s Block by David Markson

Asylum by Christopher Payne

My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love by Kara Walker et al.

A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

Money by Martin Amis

Salvage the Bones by Jessmyn Ward

October/November:

reread The Journals of John Cheever

reread Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez

Darkness Visible by William Styron

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

reread Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

August/September

One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainana

There But for The by Ali Smith

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Parallel Lives by Peter Nadas

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb

Noon by Aatish Taseer

Reread Rimbaud by Graham Robb

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

We the Animals by Justin Torres

John Berger: Selected Essays, Ed. by Geoff Dyer

Bookforum, Summer 2o11

Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.”

Too much?

Take a city sidewalk. Take a bucket of “blood.” Splatter. Hide. Look at people looking at the “blood.”

How much is too much?

This is the horror art of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American performance artist; the scenarios are taken from 1973’s Rape Scene and People Looking at Blood, Moffitt. Mendieta is one of the battalion of painters, filmmakers, and novelists analyzed in The Art of Cruelty, an earnest but scattershot book by poet and critic Maggie Nelson. Nelson writes about artists for whom cruelty is the medium and the message, the subject and the method: Think Francis Bacon’s slabs of meat and hacked-open faces, the parlor inquisitions of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, the antebellum nightmares of Kara Walker, the variously bludgeoned, humiliated, and carved-up “heroines” of Lars von Trier’s films. Mendieta is, Nelson writes, “drawing attention, via horror, to a horror that had been inadequately attended to. But her compulsion to re-enact [the rape piece] (not once but twice!) and to terrorize an unwitting audience (not once but twice!) complicates any simple look-at-how-bad-rape-and-murder-is feminist gesture.” It’s this complication, this ritualism, the oblique motivations and skirting of sadism, that fascinate Nelson and make Mendieta’s work “so formidable.”

This is a book born of a particular time. The photographs from Abu Ghraib are very much on Nelson’s mind. In a world where cruelty is so commonplace, Nelson asks, why do we go to art for facsimiles? Can seeing sadism playacted teach us anything about cruelty? (Nelson’s response: Maybe.) Won’t prolonged exposure to brutality make us more brutal? (Quite possibly.) Most important, can we come to a definition of what kinds of depictions of cruelty are “worthwhile” and what are gratuitous or downright dangerous? (Absolutely.)

So we enter violent imaginations, into art that is endured rather than enjoyed, whose mere descriptions can terrify (e.g., Jenny Holzer’s series on rape as a weapon of war, “Lustmord”). Nelson makes a stab at organizing her investigations under broad, evocative categories: A section called “Inflicted,” for example, studies why some artists render meaning dramatically, with, in the words of Ionesco, a “bludgeon blow.” On each writer or painting, she is coherent, but the overarching argument is haphazard. “Inflicted” hopscotches from sword imagery in the New Testament and Buddhism through Kafka, Brian Evenson, and Wittgenstein, then moves on to vagina imagery, an analysis of Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica, and the contention that the prose of some contemporary female writers is “fiercer in form and effect than that of their male counterparts.” It’s like reading a Tumblr full of tenuously connected posts—a tangle of other people’s thoughts and observations.

What we want is more of Nelson’s blunt commentary, as when she describes author Jane Bowles thus: “Like many artists of cruelty [Bowles] is no philosopher. She is roaming a world of balloons, armed with a pin.” Nelson swiftly sums up Neil LaBute as “weak-minded,” and observes of Walker and Sylvia Plath: “Both remain seemingly more transfixed by the psychology—and erotics—of oppression than of liberation.” Her generalizations can ring so true that they’re like hearing your own half-realized truths in someone else’s mouth.

But this quality of thought is too frequently concealed behind an impermeable, marmoreal style of academic theory. This voice does not come naturally to Nelson, but she adopts it nonetheless to quell a suspicion about beautifully made arguments—namely, that it is hard to know when they are false. So she chooses—to her detriment—rococo sentence constructions. For instance: “Do we really live under the aegis of these opposing threats, or is it the very reiteration of them as our two primary ontological options (and our unthinking acquiescence to such a formulation) that acts as a truer threat to our enlivenment, to our full experience of the vast space between these two poles—a space which, after all, is where the great majority of many of our lives takes place?”

Ambiguity is a key feature of the art of cruelty. When we look at People Looking at Blood, Moffitt, we’re not certain how we fit into the tableau. Who are we—Mendieta’s conspirators? Her witnesses? Her victims? It’s as critic M. L. Rosenthal wrote of Sylvia Plath’s poems: In them, Plath is “victim, killer, and the place of horror, all at once.” What we need from an interlocutor in this world is an attention to nuance, certainly, but clarity above all. Here, instead, we get congeries of clauses and qualifiers and a hectic tour of contemporary art and politics. Like a ruthless docent, Nelson hurries us along: We can’t dawdle on Diane Arbus—there’s James Frey, Sonia Sotomayor, Hugo Chavez, J. L. Austin, Alexander Trocchi, and the Yes Men to get through. Chop-chop.

She is at her best when she allows herself to linger. When she meditates on how, for example, Mendieta’s obsessions intersect with her politics or the torsion in the artist-viewer relationship. Nelson is so strong on this last point—pondering how artists of cruelty hold our attention even as they strive to offend and terrify us—that it’s a pity she chooses not to engage the reader more in her own book, to demand, as Mendieta does, our attention andcomplicity. She’s here to reckon with cruelty. We’re here to watch. But Nelson keeps the reader at bay. The Art of Cruelty was initially a university course, and the book retains a whiff of a particularly demanding seminar. But we’re not able to participate or ask questions. We slump in drowsy reverence as Nelson loads up the next set of slides.