Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly when it comes to what his grandfather preached: “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand for himself as a Jew.” All this standing, complicates Bucky’s life. He cannot, like his friends, serve in the big European war because of his poor vision, a fact used later as metaphor for what Bucky can and can’t see. Standing up like a man means knowing better than those who love you, and doing things they would not have you do. Failing this once is a hard lesson. Failing it twice isn’t allowed, even when it precludes a better decision.

Nemesis is Roth’s The Plague. The inexplicable existentialism of the disease’s spread challenges the easy notion of standing up no matter the circumstances. Like Camus, Roth keeps his narrator hidden for a good part of the book, giving the story an omniscient depth that seems to sink and surface as the story progresses. Like Camus, Roth has Bucky pose questions, not to, but about God.  As in Camus, God comes up terribly cruel or missing altogether.

Bucky’s sense of duty is a source of guilt. But it is also the source of his pride. When Italian teenagers invade the playground from their neighborhood where the disease has taken up residence, Bucky stands up to their threats and washes away their spit. His need to pass on his Grandfather’s advice to the boys on the playground makes him a hero to the boys and a champion in the neighborhood. When his love seeks to draw him away to the safety of the country he first refuses.

But not for long. His fear gets the better of him and he takes a job at an upstate summer camp away from the “equatorial” heat and disease of Newark.  The experience give him both a false sense of security and new reason for fear.  He’s bothered that his  girlfriend’s younger sisters cling to him and kiss him on the mouth.  When he and his beloved take a canoe and go to an island where they can be alone, storm clouds rumble in the distance. Despite this overplay, the moments of foreshadowing are chilling against the supposed blue-skies future.

Ethnic issues  — the Italian neighborhood that the disease first over runs while the Jewish neighborhood seems, as if by God, protected — are underplayed, serving as little more than setting to the action. Placed in a time when the Holocaust was reaching its horrific zenith in Europe, the  story seems designed to contrast human and natural suffering. But despite grandpa’s urging for Bucky to stand like a Jew, the comparisons are, like God, missing.

This is some of the genius of Roth’s story and keys to a short novel. He doesn’t need to connect the dots. The reader is entirely capable. Suggestion is more than enough to make the horrors of spreading death part of the tone, part of the setting.

In other ways, Roth seems to telegraph what’s coming. Bucky’s two buddies serving bravely in Europe? Don’t ask. His frequent declarations of happiness — that memory of eating a peach with his fiance’s father  –  suggest unhappiness looms. And don’t forget those thunder clouds advancing as the two make love.

Because of these clues, when the end comes Roth is largely able to skip over it and get right to the denouement. Now Grandpa’s advice works against Bucky. He can no longer stand like a man. His own strength and beauty gone, he relies on pride to carry him forward into a future he didn’t imagine. His narrator, during a chance encounter, hears the whole story. And he, like us, can’t quite figure it out.

Roth’s tale is at once a reminder of how our fears and superstitions color our most immediate reactions and important decisions. There’s hints that an ignorance of science,  in this case, how polio is transmitted, leads to misguided anger and judgment. The ethnic and racial prejudice of the time (not so unlike the prejudice of current time) clouds understanding. There are so many of these intervening factors in the book that it’s easy to believe its title should be plural if the series didn’t already carry that name.

Despite the obvious clues where all of it is leading, Nemesis is absorbing and propulsive reading, the kind of book you want to consume in a sitting (but it will take two). Much of this is due to Roth’s craft, the smoothly consumed rhythms and phrasing as natural as a jump-rope rhyme. It’s lesson isn’t so much not to get comfortable because life has something else in store for us but, instead,  not to be so forthright and resolute because, again, life has something else in store for us.–Cabbage Rabbit

Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was a tincture of its times, a distillation of a particular culture (recent Russian-American) with a heavy scent of satire. His latest, Super Sad True Love Story travels into the future of, as the jacket states, “say next Tuesday,” to further concentrate its contemporary satire. As with all satire, there’s an implied scolding: See America? This is what you’re headed for if you’re not careful.

Those on the right and the left will feel a certain discomfort (as will the wired, socially connected crowd) as they read through accounts of yuan-pegged dollar, the now truly-national National Guard and mega-merger corporations including (and we do mean including) AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit.

Actually, right and left no longer matter. The Bipartisan Party, led by Defense Secretary Rubenstein — its slogan, “Together We’ll Surprise the World!” is even more cynical than  “We Will Win the Future” — is in control in partnership with the “American Restoration Authority ” (ARA). The  National Guard, fresh back from a disastrous action in Venezuela are reluctantly cooperating. Thanks to budget cuts (the Chinese are threatening to foreclose and the IMF is demanding change), the Guard isn’t getting what they’ve been promised. Sure, you  have your choice between FoxNews-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra,  networks that still focuses on gay marriage even as forced relocation turns violent. But the networks don’t seem to care that a lot of Americans have suddenly become disposable. Sound familiar?

It depends on your classification, “High Net Worth Individuals” (HNWI) or “Low NetWorth Individuals” (LNWI), usually corresponding to your category of employment — “credit,” media” or “retail”— or lack of one. Credit ratings reign and people use their apparat to constantly monitor that as well as the “Personality” and “Fuckability” ratings of themselves and those around them.  Mostly, people are judged mostly by the classic:  young and old.

Young is where it’s at. Everyone’s plugged into their own apparati, constantly “teening” and ordering the latest fashions from AssLuxury. Or finding out absolutely everything about everybody, constantly churning data, privacy be damned. Or streaming their own media — anyone can be a star!  –  say from the barroom where they happen to be located. The young are extremely beautiful and intend to stay that ways thanks to new creams and emollients, vitamins and tiny blood-traveling robots (“smart blood”) sent on an oxidant search-and-destroy mission.

Like Huxley’s After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, Sad True frames itself around questions of mortality even as it uses the space inside to address a wider range of cultural and political issues. Shtengart’s framing is precise to the times yet timeless. Everyone knows it’s youth that counts. Bring on the quacks.

Our hero, Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old slug taking sabbatical in Rome, is too morose to pursue his own youthification even though he works as “Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator of Post-Human Services” for the security-pharmaceutical company Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, a sort of KBR for next Tuesday. An aspiring HNWI and overweight (by next Tuesday’s standards),  Lenny practices a sort of nostalgia that is disgusting to nearly everyone: he reads books.

And then he falls in love. Euncie is beautiful, Korean, incredibly but not illegally young and carries a degree in Image and a minor in Assertiveness. But somehow she’s attracted to Lenny’s sincerity and his books. It gives Lenny a reason to live, to delude himself: “I’m never going to die,” he declares, believing that the technology exists to make good on the promise.

For Lenny, there’s no choice between Eunice, “a nano sized woman who had likely never known the tickle of her own pubic hair…who existed as easily on an apparat screen as on the street before me,” and his Italian fling Fabrizia, “her body counquered by small armies of hair, her curves fixed by carbohydrates, nothing but the Old World and its dying nonelectronic corporeality.”

While Lenny’s larger issues with love, individualism and acceptance of mortality are the book’s central theme, its take on America is what propels it. Shteyngart doesn’t like the direction. Well before the end, before New York is turned into a “Lifestyle Hub,”  we see Sad True’s parable, stated as Lenny witnesses two men being taken away after their apparati and everyone’s is checked  by “angrier and more sunburned than usual” National Guardsmen. The racial and class distinctions at play in the scene, coupled with the brute enforcement of search preludes the book’s biggest scolding: “the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, ever after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite.”

All The Onion-like, satiric cleverness—and we’ve only touched its ironic surface—extends down to each chosen word. Past reviews of made much of Shteyngart’s amazing turn of phrase and they’re still accurate here. The book is presented in Lenny’s diary entries (another of his nostalgic weaknesses, even if electronic) and Eunice’s texting and “teening.” Only Lenny and one of his few friends have much interest in lengthy “verballing,” all but a lost art.

While at its base Sad True is two-thirds of the traditional love story–boy-meets-girl, boy-get-girl, boy-lose-girl to HNWI-boss– it’s propelled by its larger social, political and sexual themes. It’s a fictional characterization of the Shock Doctrine, as applied to contemporary America. Elderly LNWIs are evicted and camps of unemployed squatters are liquidated in flames, all set to the oblivious rhythms of the uber-connected masses. The rise of financial institutions, the divide between rich and poor, the loss of attention as technology consumes it and  our country’s indebtedness, especially to China, are all taken to not-so distant extremes. That’s why the book makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. It’s also why we couldn’t put it down.–Cabbage Rabbit

It’s New Years Eve on a closing decade and we’re feeling a certain obligation, though not because of any clamoring demand to, to….. We’ve never liked top-ten lists,- year-end lists, best-of-the-decade lists, that sort of thing. And for all the usual reasons. Now, as the old song goes, everybody’s doin’ it.  (Matthew Yglesias,  discussing top-ten lists,  says “One of the pernicious impacts of the rise of the internet is how everyone gets to publish their own list.”) Pernicious? In the interest of helping drive the stake in this monster’s heart, here we go. What qualifies the Rabbit? Not much. Sure, we had a long publication history back when but our appetites have always trumped taste. And our tastes tend toward the strange and eclectic. Most of all, even with our ears and wiggly nose, we could never hear/read everything we wanted let alone things we never knew. Nor do we want to be held to release dates limited to the last 365 days (see March Hare) even though we cycle through a lot of the new and now.  But in the spirit of recognition, as a means of thanks (we couldn’t have done it without you), here are the books and recordings that helped us to get through it all. Because good books and good music make life worth living.

BOOKS

The Shaghai Gesture by Gary Indiana; Two Dollar Press. For the cleverness and laughs not to mention world-wide conspiracy.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon; Penguin Press. Genius confirmed. Did we mention world-wide conspiracy?

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin; Copper Canyon Press. The natural world reminds an old poet what’s left to learn. Punctuation not included.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike; Knopf.  Mature themes (you know what I mean)  and grace from one of the great man of letters. He’ll be missed.

Report On Myself by Gregoire Bouillier; Mariner Books. And I thought I had problems.

What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems by Ruth Stone; Copper Canyon Press. The later poems in this volume make real and worthy connection to the natural world.

The Bear from Go Down Moses by William Faulkner; Random House. What we lose when we lose wild places.

The Undiscovered Self by C. G. Jung; Atlantic, Little Brown; and The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung; The Modern Library. To understand symbol, image and archetype and because I dream.

The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere; Verso. Image and politics. See above.

The Complete Crumb Comics: Volume 6 “On the Crest Of a Wave” by R. Crumb. Helps us to remember when.

The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley; Basic Civitas Books. A wise man seeks patience in a cruel world.

In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison; Copper Canyon Press. Poems in which the mundane becomes magnificent.

The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier; First Second. Part photo collection, part graphic novel…what makes us think our experience in Afghanistan will be different than the Soviets? 

MUSIC

Up Popped Two Lips by Henry Threadgill’s Zooid; Pi Recordings. A twisted puzzle, with oud. How does it all go together?

Cartography by Arve Henriksen; ECM. Poetic electronic and percussion landscapes from the speech-inflected trumpeter.

75 by Joe Zawinul; Heads Up. Sure, we like Brown Street better but as the last recording by a great innovator (with Wayne Shorter on a cut no less) and, well, we miss you, Joe…

Blood From the Stars by Joe Henry; Anti. The songwriter who sinks his faith in image and rhythm recalls Katrina with blues-inflected (natch) seriousness.

New York Days by Enrico Rava; ECM. Moody, intellectual, beautiful.

The Complete On the Corner Sessions by Miles Davis; Columbia. We have a weakness.

Set the Alarm For Monday by Bobby Previte; Palmetto. Keeps us in real time.

Bartok: The Six String Quartets by the Takacs Quartet; Hungaraton. Always. There’s no better way to start the day than to try and figure these out.

Radiolarians II by Medeski, Martin & Wood; Indirecto Records. Take away the groove…

The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu by Carla Bley; ECM. Jazz–now and then–and more. That’s Paolo on trumpet

The Essential Leonard Cohen; Columbia. Poetic nostalgia; don’t ask.

…and all the other life-sustaining words and sounds my addled mind has, for the moment, lost.–Cabbage Rabbit

Turn-of-the 20th-century inventor-physicist Nikolas Telsa has seen a revival lately. David Bowie played him in the 2006 magicians’ rivalry movie The Prestige. And there’s an electric car company named in his honor. Now there’s Samantha Hunt’s novel that takes the facts of Tesla’s life and imagines him in 1943, the year of his death. Even in his day, the father of radio waves, x-rays and alternating current was associated with the fantastic and Hunt’s story expounds on his mad-scientist reputation with plot twists and hints of time-travel, mind-reading and bringing the dead to life. Forgotten and living in a hotel, the 86-year-old inventor is befriended by a young chamber maid who shares his love of pigeons. She also has a father intent on going back in time to reunite with his late wife. Using multiple narrators, Hunt explores aging, imagination, devotion, success and bygone New York in this hallucinatory tale focused on a strange but brilliant old man. Capitalism takes its knocks. Unlike rival Thomas Edison, Tesla believed “invention is nothing a man can own.” He championed wireless transmission of energy and generation of electricity from the very air. Where is he when we need him? –Cabbage Rabbit