The Anglo-American literary/journalistic elite, apparently following their counterparts in Latin America, has generated an awful lot of hype about Roberto Bolaño, the late Chilean/international novelist and poet, so I thought I owed it to my own cultural capital to check the guy out. Bolaño’s long novel The Savage Detectives has recently been translated and published, and his much longer novel 2666 is on the way. The short novel that I plucked from the library shelves, Amulet, apparently contains characters from these other works, including Arturito Belano, Bolaño’s fictional alter ego. Auxilio Lacouture, an illegal Uruguyan immigrant to Mexico City who spends all her time hanging around with the young poets of the city, narrates Amulet in a phantasmagorical interior monologue seemingly delivered from her fortnight’s captivity in a university bathroom during the Mexican government’s brutal suppression of the 1968 uprisings. Though apparently confined to these two weeks within the bathroom, Auxilio’s reflections and memories scatter over a range of years extending into the ’70s, and evoke not only various locales in and around Mexico City, but also hallucinatory plains, abysses and realms of ice, in what amounts to a brief epic about the struggle of a generation of artists, misfits and radicals to survive and find joy despite the barbarism of the times.

Indeed, at the end of the novel, in a kind of politico-moral excresence, Auxilio tells us this herself as she experiences a vision of a mass of children marching and singing across a valley toward an abyss:

And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.

And that song is our amulet.

It’s my contention that Bolaño did not have to say this outright because it is implicit in all the best moments of this novel. Wayne Kostenbaum’s blurb on the jacket of the library copy of Amulet says: “I am addicted to the haze that floats above Bolaño’s fictions.” This is a perceptive comment: atmosphere is, as far as I can tell from this book, what he does best. He calls up a blighted urban landscape, a bohemia of passed-out writers, reclusive poets, tortured revolutionaries and self-destroying prostitutes that, let’s be frank, looks impossibly glamorous to an international intelligentsia whose last three decades of cautiously conformist politics and whimsically well-behaved fiction are beginning to look a lot less appealing in the sickening light of Iraq’s ruin (not to speak of Afghanistan’s, or Yugoslavia’s). Here is Bolaño, in the voice of Auxilio, creating atmosphere:

I could laugh at my skirts, my stovepipe trousers, my stripy tights, my white socks, my page-boy hair going whiter by the day, my eyes scanning the nights of Mexico City, my pink ears attuned to all the university gossip: the rises and falls, who got put down, who got passed over, who was sucking up to whom, the stars of the day, the inflated reputations, rickety beds that were taken apart and reassembled under the convulsive sky of Mexico City, that sky I knew so well, that restless, unattainable sky, like an Aztec cooking pot, under which I came and went, happy just to be alive, with all the poets of Mexico City and Arturito Belano, who was seventeen years old, then eighteen, I could practically see him growing. They were all growing up, under my watchful eye, not that it afforded them much protection. They were all growing up, exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the stunned figures, the groups of shadows, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair? No, it has to be admitted, their words were fairly miserable.

But this novel, not least by its searing construction and deconstruction of Auxilio, whom I love, dismantles the mentality that would write off the doom or disappearance of any or all the poets just because of the failure of their words. In Amulet’s centerpiece, Arturo Belano, returned to Mexico City from Chile, were he was imprisoned and possibly tortured during the (U.S.-sponsored) fascist coup against Allende’s government, journeys to a dangerous part of town to free a friend from his enslavement to the King of the Rent Boys. Unbeknownst to Arturo and his friend, Auxilio follows them to bear witness. In the end, Artuto and company discover a sick young prostitute, another slave to the King, and Belano manages to use the authority he has acquired from surviving the right-wing terror to stare down the King of the Rent Boys and free the young prostitute, who recovers in their care.

And here I can’t resist quoting from the review of this novel in the odious New Republic, just to give an example of that frame of mind which Bolaño sets himself and his characters against:

This validation for the mistakes of youth must also contribute to the reverence for Bolaño among young writers. He preserves the songs produced by ill-formed, angry, or just silly ideologies, and recognizes the underlying goodness of their intentions. Auxilio and Belano are faced with a draining of purpose from their actions when they rescue a sick, weak prostitute and set him up with a job, only to encounter him later, strung out from sniffing glue and close to death. But they concur that it does not matter that the prostitute was going to die. “Our hidden purpose,” Auxilio says, “had been to stop him from being killed.” An ultimately futile campaign is not without importance, in Bolaño’s world. A poet may not be able to stop Pinochet, but he can testify to the attempt.

There’s the moral disaster that is The New Republic in a nutshell, so disappointed that these goddamn Slavs and Arabs and Africans they keep trying to liberate with their humanitarian bombs can’t get the inferiority proportion just right: they must of course be a little bit inferior so as to steady the ego of the Enlightenment missionary, but they must not be so inferior as to reject—quelle horreur!—the advice of the missionary on how to live. Fuckin’ glue-sniffing Iraqis. Last time we help anybody! Oh wait! Darfur! Never again! Bombs away!

This kind of corruption of the notion of solidarity has no place in Bolaño’s universe—as if a someone who sniffs glue has no right to live!—and he manages too to recover the concept of Enlightenment:

I know that she has seen many bad things, the ascension of the devil, the unstoppable procession of termites climbing the Tree of Life, the conflict between the Enlightenment and the Shadow or the Empire or the Kingdom of Order, which are all proper names for the irrational stain that is bent on turning us into beasts or robots, and which has been fighting the Enlightenment since the beginning of time (a conjecture of mine, which the official representatives of the Enlightenment would no doubt reject)…

But a fine conjecture, one which I deeply share, and which warms my anarch heart.

Anyway, the novel has a second set piece, a darker one beyond my comptence, when Auxilio visits the underworld in the form of the recluse artist son of another poet. He tells her the unfinished story of how Orestes, occupying his home country and carrying out a reign of terror against the remaining supporters and relatives of his mother’s lover, nevertheless falls madly in love with the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The coldly calculating Electra demands that this girl be dispatched, but Orestes resists and tries to plot her escape. I don’t know whether this is some sort of allegory for the various right-wing dictatorships of Latin America, but it suggests at any rate a reframing of the recovery of Enlightenment, and a taking sides against Orestes and Electra and Apollo and the deceptive reign of cold law which their actions instituted in Athens. It’s worth mentioning that Orestes only mentions the Furies once, but he refers to them as the Erinyes rather than as the Eumenides: that is, he does not call them the kindly ones. And the kindliest one, Auxilio, who calls herself “the mother of Mexican poetry,” though she is not Mexican and neither is Belano/Bolaño, might herself, as witness, be the revenge of the family of poets, that is, the family of man, on the kingdom of Order, who are men too, and have spilled the blood of men, that is, family blood.

The novel’s final set piece is Auxilio’s prophecy, delivered to a voice questioning her while she hallucinates an icebound landscape. She foretells the fates of the twentieth century’s writers:

Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become an Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101.

It continues in this vein for another three pages, until Auxilio has to stop and explain to the confused voice that “Alice Sheldon” was the real name of James Tiptree, Jr., which (speaking of my cultural capital) I already knew.

The governing sentiment is almost too familiar to express, but despite its familiarity it has gained no purchase on a world run by the kinds of idiots who read The New Republic. Poetry, even that written by stupid poets who flatter tyrants, is a utopia, one where the Auxilios of the world and the glue-sniffers and down-at-heel visionaries will find permanent citizenship and a stipend to boot; and utopia will always return. And that’s it.

In his Nation review of DeLillo’s Falling Man, John Leonard wrote:

In this, among the 9/11 novels I have read, by Ian McEwan, Reynolds Price, Jay McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer, it most resembles the best of them, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall, in which, after the divebombing of the World Trade Center, a linguist named Renata at the New York Public Library is asked to add Arabic to her other exotic languages (Bliondan, Etinoi), even as she tries to cope with a crazy mother, an importunate lover, a teenage mute, a dead twin and the child she thinks she lost on a merry-go-round. In both books, the melding of the psychological and geopolitical dreamworlds feels inevitable rather than willed, as starkly elegant and illuminated as the calligraphy of medieval monks.

Now Leonard is not a foolish man. When I was in high school, I used to set my alarm to 9:00 so I could watch his book, TV and movie reviews on the otherwise godawful CBS Sunday Morning. So, even though he did not mention William Gibson’s staggeringly beautiful novel about 9/11, Pattern Recognition, I took seriously his recommendation of The Writing on the Wall, which I’d never even heard of, and checked it out of the library.

If I hadn’t been in the mood for something thoroughly undemanding after a grueling semester in grad school, I might have thrown the book down after the first sentence:

On bright mornings, the sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals.

Sliding? Not even the sunlight sliding, but the sun. That’s bad enough, but now the sliding sun also stamps, like some kind of industrial press. The confusion in imagery is followed by a confusion in number, where a pattern resembles petals—felicity if not an actual grammatical rule demands that the singular pattern resemble another singular noun—a scattering of petals, perhaps.

Now you’re thinking, “Christ almighty, what a pedant!” Well, let me tell you that these objections didn’t occur to me on the first reading of the sentence; I just felt that it clunked. I read further, however, and it turns out that, just as Leonard had written, the protoganist, gifted with a preternatural facility for language-learning, works as a linguist for the New York Public Library, and she abhors any imprecise or obfuscatory use of language. This conceit unfortunately sets Schwartz a higher bar than she can clear.

However, except in a banal sense, the primary unit of meaning in a novel is not the individual word or even the sentence. I reject the Nabokovian modernist dogma that every sentence in a novel must have all the sonic and imagistic richness of a line of poetry. The language of novels is cumulative in effect and produces, over and above any local pleasures, a global sense of character, situation and mood. (Christ, what an old-fashioned thing to write; they’re going to throw me out of grad school yet!)

Schwartz isn’t bad at this central task—if she were, I’d have stopped reading. Her problem is evidently a lack of faith in her own skill, because she ruins what could have been a fine, slim, elegant story about the intersection of one city’s catastrophe with the emotional unfolding of one its citizens with a lot of under-developed Lifetime-movie-of-the-week stuff. See, the protagonist is so emotionally stunted because her twin sister was impregnated by her uncle and then committed suicide when they were sixteen. As if that weren’t enough, the couple who adopted the sister’s baby ran off and our heroine had to raise the child…that is, until the child was snatched off a merry-go-round! So not only does our heroine have to deal with the collapse of the WTC and the vicissitudes of her budding romance with a renegade social worker, but also a final confrontation with the nefarious uncle, now dying in a Texas hospital, as well as an encounter with a mute survivor of the attack who may or may be the kidnapped child from ten years back.

There is no need for this concatenation of unlikelihoods. Stick to the emotionally inaccessible heroine, the budding romance, the terrorist attack and maybe-just-maybe the mute girl (shades of DeLillo!). In any case, the only reason that these strained events don’t overwhelm the novel is because Schwarz doesn’t seem that interested in them, as well she shouldn’t be. The sister’s character remains insubstantial, the wicked uncle is wicked and no more, and the years the heroine spent raising her niece are sketched with insufficient lightness given what their emotional consequences must have been.

Schwarz’s story ought to have been far simpler in structure: beginning: Renata meets Jack; complications: Twin Towers collapse, Renata displaces her previously blocked emotions onto mute girl, breaks up with Jack; ending: Renata and Jack get back together. There, a classic romantic comedy, except not so funny.

(What about the objection that it’s indecent to annex a mass slaughter to such a slight tale of private life? Eh, tell it to Homer. All those men died at Troy and I’m supposed to care about Achilles? And yet, and yet…I do.)

………………….

Speaking of romantic comedy, the Gilmore Girls series finale aired last night. The show had long ceased to be any good, but the final episode somehow managed to recapture the pleasantly anarchic atmosphere of the early seasons as it wended its way through the town in a valedictory salute to all of the characters. Lorelai and Luke got together, and Rory went off to be a journalist with the Barack Obama campaign. Thus ends our unconvincing recapitulation of the rise of the middle class and of its moral codes,  embodied, as in Jane Austen, by the smartest girl in the room. (The show, overtly liberal in its politics, is deeply reactionary in a number of ways and is susceptible to Marxist demolition. But save that for another day!)

Since we don’t watch enough television in this country, here’s a Youtube clip of the Luke/Lorelai reconciliation, which was satisfyingly underplayed, thus pointing up its very inevitability (a canny move). I place it here mainly to show that these two can act, especially Lauren Graham:

There now, how can we have a war czar when such romance exists?