The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

And now we may add to the mix Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, which I picked up at the office of the magazine where I hang my occasional hat. This is an interesting book for me to pick up right now because it matches what I'm interested in at the moment: direct language, direct ways of saying things. Directness has for too long been the province of less imaginative poets. There's something haunting, and truly sad, and truly upsetting about the book, but one sense that Nelson must have taken great pleasure in writing the book. And by pleasure, of course, I don't mean happiness, I suppose I mean gratification. You get the sense of real progress as the book moves along, of mental evolution, of the intellectual penetration of genealogy, of going beyond naive wonderings about ancestry to something more inclusive, or at least more permeable.

The Saramago, yes, sure, but I am also adding a book by Ann Patchett called The Magician's Assistant. I was talking about Patchett with a writer friend today and she said Patchett's style was too plain. I guess you could say that, but I find the plainness more exciting than styles that grandstand or call attention to themselves. That sort of thing is to be realized and handled in grad school, I would think. Patchett's work seems, above all else, very honest and very unshakable. You couldn't easily trim it, or skip over passages, nor can you turn away from it easily. Each sentence in Bel Canto, the novel I read before this one, moved forward like a piece of journalism, and it was impossible not to love it for its directness. It's sexual, but it's also friendly. She might scare off a lot of people because she has been so well-publicized; the idea that she's possibly many people's favorite might obliterate any chance of appreciating the actual quality of the work. A sad thing. We should not begrudge fictionists their financial success. And who are we, we poets? Many poets were born rich, anyway--that's the only way they can pursue their ambitions.